Generate synthetic datasets and scenarios by learning from the real world

Abstract: The modern paradigms of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence base their success on processing a large quantity of data. Nevertheless, data does not come for free, and it can sometimes be practically unfeasible to collect enough data to train machine learning models successfully. That is the main reason why synthetic data generation is of great interest in the research community. Generating realistic synthetic data can empower machine learning models with vast datasets that are difficult to collect in the real world. In autonomous vehicles, it would require thousands of hours of driving recording for a machine learning model to learn how to drive a car in a safety-critical and effective way. The use of synthetic data, on the other hand, make it possible to simulate many different driving scenarios at a much lower cost. This thesis investigates the functioning of Meta-Sim, a synthetic data generator used to create datasets by learning from the real world. I evaluated the effects of replacing the stem of the Inception-V3 with the stem of the Inception- V4 as the feature extractor needed to process image data. Results showed similar behaviour of models that used the stem of the Inception-V4 instead of the Inception-V3. Slightly differences were found when the model tried to simulate more complex images. In these cases, the models that use the stem of the Inception-V4 converged in fewer iterations than those that used the Inception-V3, demonstrating superior behaviours of the Inception-V4. In the end, I proved that the Inception-V4 could be used to achieve state-of-the- art results in synthetic data generation. Moreover, in specific cases, I show that the Inception-V4 can exceed the performance attained by Meta-Sim. The outcome suggests further research in the field to validate the results on a larger scale.