BigDatasetGAN: Synthesizing ImageNet with Pixel-wise Annotations

Annotating images with pixel-wise labels is a timeconsuming and costly process. Recently, DatasetGAN [82] showcased a promising alternative – to synthesize a large labeled dataset via a generative adversarial network (GAN) by exploiting a small set of manually labeled, GANgenerated images. Here, we scale DatasetGAN to ImageNet scale of class diversity. We take image samples from the class-conditional generative model BigGAN [6] trained on ImageNet, and manually annotate only 5 images per class, for all 1k classes. By training an effective feature segmentation architecture on top of BigGAN, we turn BigGAN into a labeled dataset generator. We further show that VQGAN [19] can similarly serve as a dataset generator, leveraging the already annotated data. We create a new ImageNet benchmark by labeling an additional set of real images and evaluate segmentation performance in a variety of settings. Through an extensive ablation study, we show big gains in leveraging a large generated dataset to train different supervised and self-supervised backbone models on pixel-wise tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that using our synthesized datasets for pre-training leads to improvements over standard ImageNet pre-training on several downstream datasets, such as PASCAL-VOC, MS-COCO, Cityscapes and chest X-ray, as well as tasks (detection, segmentation). Our benchmark will be made public and maintain a leaderboard for this challenging task. Project Page: https://nv-tlabs.github.io/big-datasetgan/