Papers
arxiv:2410.15002

How Many Van Goghs Does It Take to Van Gogh? Finding the Imitation Threshold

Published on Oct 19
· Submitted by Royir on Oct 22
Authors:
,
,
,
,
,
,
,

Abstract

Text-to-image models are trained using large datasets collected by scraping image-text pairs from the internet. These datasets often include private, copyrighted, and licensed material. Training models on such datasets enables them to generate images with such content, which might violate copyright laws and individual privacy. This phenomenon is termed imitation -- generation of images with content that has recognizable similarity to its training images. In this work we study the relationship between a concept's frequency in the training dataset and the ability of a model to imitate it. We seek to determine the point at which a model was trained on enough instances to imitate a concept -- the imitation threshold. We posit this question as a new problem: Finding the Imitation Threshold (FIT) and propose an efficient approach that estimates the imitation threshold without incurring the colossal cost of training multiple models from scratch. We experiment with two domains -- human faces and art styles -- for which we create four datasets, and evaluate three text-to-image models which were trained on two pretraining datasets. Our results reveal that the imitation threshold of these models is in the range of 200-600 images, depending on the domain and the model. The imitation threshold can provide an empirical basis for copyright violation claims and acts as a guiding principle for text-to-image model developers that aim to comply with copyright and privacy laws. We release the code and data at https://github.com/vsahil/MIMETIC-2.git and the project's website is hosted at https://how-many-van-goghs-does-it-take.github.io.

Community

Paper submitter

Text-to-image models are trained using large datasets collected by scraping image-text pairs from the internet. These datasets often include private, copyrighted, and licensed material. Training models on such datasets enables them to generate images with such content, which might violate copyright laws and individual privacy. This phenomenon is termed imitation -- generation of images with content that has recognizable similarity to its training images. In this work we study the relationship between a concept's frequency in the training dataset and the ability of a model to imitate it. We seek to determine the point at which a model was trained on enough instances to imitate a concept -- the imitation threshold. We posit this question as a new problem: Finding the Imitation Threshold (FIT) and propose an efficient approach that estimates the imitation threshold without incurring the colossal cost of training multiple models from scratch. We experiment with two domains -- human faces and art styles -- for which we create four datasets, and evaluate three text-to-image models which were trained on two pretraining datasets. Our results reveal that the imitation threshold of these models is in the range of 200-600 images, depending on the domain and the model. The imitation threshold can provide an empirical basis for copyright violation claims and acts as a guiding principle for text-to-image model developers that aim to comply with copyright and privacy laws. We release the code and data at https://github.com/vsahil/MIMETIC-2.git and the project's website is hosted at https://how-many-van-goghs-does-it-take.github.io.

This is an automated message from the Librarian Bot. I found the following papers similar to this paper.

The following papers were recommended by the Semantic Scholar API

Please give a thumbs up to this comment if you found it helpful!

If you want recommendations for any Paper on Hugging Face checkout this Space

You can directly ask Librarian Bot for paper recommendations by tagging it in a comment: @librarian-bot recommend

Heated topic... some measurable grounds definitely needed

Sign up or log in to comment

Models citing this paper 0

No model linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2410.15002 in a model README.md to link it from this page.

Datasets citing this paper 0

No dataset linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2410.15002 in a dataset README.md to link it from this page.

Spaces citing this paper 0

No Space linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2410.15002 in a Space README.md to link it from this page.

Collections including this paper 0

No Collection including this paper

Add this paper to a collection to link it from this page.