Procedural Image Programs for Representation Learning

Abstract

Learning image representations using synthetic data allows training neural networks without some of the concerns associated with real images, such as privacy and bias. Existing work focuses on a handful of curated generative processes which require expert knowledge to design, making it hard to scale up. To overcome this, we propose training with a large dataset of twenty-one thousand programs, each one generating a diverse set of synthetic images. These programs are short code snippets, which are easy to modify and fast to execute using OpenGL. The proposed dataset can be used for both supervised and unsupervised representation learning and reduces the gap between pre-training with real and procedurally generated images by 38%. Code, models, and datasets are available at: https://github.com/mbaradad/shaders21k.