Golden Ratio Weighting Prevents Model Collapse

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: He, Hengzhi, Xu, Shirong, Cheng, Guang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author He, Hengzhi
Xu, Shirong
Cheng, Guang
author_facet He, Hengzhi
Xu, Shirong
Cheng, Guang
contents Recent studies identified an intriguing phenomenon in recursive generative model training known as model collapse, where models trained on data generated by previous models exhibit severe performance degradation. Addressing this issue and developing more effective training strategies have become central challenges in generative model research. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon within a novel framework, where generative models are iteratively trained on a combination of newly collected real data and synthetic data from the previous training step. To develop an optimal training strategy for integrating real and synthetic data, we evaluate the performance of a weighted training scheme in various scenarios, including Gaussian distribution estimation, generalized linear models, and nonparametric estimation. We theoretically characterize the impact of the mixing proportion and weighting scheme of synthetic data on the final model's performance. Our key finding is that, across different settings, the optimal weighting scheme under different proportions of synthetic data asymptotically follows a unified expression, revealing a fundamental trade-off between leveraging synthetic data and model performance. In some cases, the optimal weight assigned to real data corresponds to the reciprocal of the golden ratio. Finally, we validate our theoretical results on extensive simulated datasets and a real tabular dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_18049
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Golden Ratio Weighting Prevents Model Collapse
He, Hengzhi
Xu, Shirong
Cheng, Guang
Machine Learning
Recent studies identified an intriguing phenomenon in recursive generative model training known as model collapse, where models trained on data generated by previous models exhibit severe performance degradation. Addressing this issue and developing more effective training strategies have become central challenges in generative model research. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon within a novel framework, where generative models are iteratively trained on a combination of newly collected real data and synthetic data from the previous training step. To develop an optimal training strategy for integrating real and synthetic data, we evaluate the performance of a weighted training scheme in various scenarios, including Gaussian distribution estimation, generalized linear models, and nonparametric estimation. We theoretically characterize the impact of the mixing proportion and weighting scheme of synthetic data on the final model's performance. Our key finding is that, across different settings, the optimal weighting scheme under different proportions of synthetic data asymptotically follows a unified expression, revealing a fundamental trade-off between leveraging synthetic data and model performance. In some cases, the optimal weight assigned to real data corresponds to the reciprocal of the golden ratio. Finally, we validate our theoretical results on extensive simulated datasets and a real tabular dataset.
title Golden Ratio Weighting Prevents Model Collapse
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18049