Synthetic Tabular Data Generation: A Comparative Survey for Modern Techniques

As privacy regulations become more stringent and access to real-world data becomes increasingly constrained, synthetic data generation has emerged as a vital solution, especially for tabular datasets, which are central to domains like finance, healthcare and the social sciences. This survey presents a comprehensive and focused review of recent advances in synthetic tabular data generation, emphasizing methods that preserve complex feature relationships, maintain statistical fidelity, and satisfy privacy requirements. A key contribution of this work is the introduction of a novel taxonomy based on practical generation objectives, including intended downstream applications, privacy guarantees, and data utility, directly informing methodological design and evaluation strategies. Therefore, this review prioritizes the actionable goals that drive synthetic data creation, including conditional generation and risk-sensitive modeling. Additionally, the survey proposes a benchmark framework to align technical innovation with real-world demands. By bridging theoretical foundations with practical deployment, this work serves as both a roadmap for future research and a guide for implementing synthetic tabular data in privacy-critical environments.

A Modular Multi-stage Lightweight Graph Transformer Network for Human Pose and Shape Estimation from 2D Human Pose

In this research, we address the challenge faced by existing deep learning-based human mesh reconstruction methods in balancing accuracy and computational efficiency. These methods typically prioritize accuracy, resulting in large network sizes and excessive computational complexity, which may hinder their practical application in real-world scenarios, such as virtual reality systems. To address this issue, we introduce a modular multi-stage lightweight graph-based transformer network for human pose and shape estimation from 2D human pose, a pose-based human mesh reconstruction approach that prioritizes computational efficiency without sacrificing reconstruction accuracy. Our method consists of a 2D-to-3D lifter module that utilizes graph transformers to analyze structured and implicit joint correlations in 2D human poses, and a mesh regression module that combines the extracted pose features with a mesh template to produce the final human mesh parameters.

Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition via Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)

Recently, there has been a remarkable increase in the interest towards skeleton-based action recognition within the research community, owing to its various advantageous features, including computational efficiency, representative features, and illumination invariance. Despite this, researchers continue to explore and investigate the most optimal way to represent human actions through skeleton representation and the extracted features. As a result, the growth and availability of human action recognition datasets have risen substantially. In addition, deep learning-based algorithms have gained widespread popularity due to the remarkable advancements in various computer vision tasks. Most state-of-the-art contributions in skeleton-based action recognition incorporate a Graph Neural Network (GCN) architecture for representing the human body and extracting features. Our research demonstrates that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can attain comparable results to GCN, provided that the proper training techniques, augmentations, and optimizers are applied. Our approach has been rigorously validated, and we have achieved a score of 95% on the NTU-60 dataset

GAN-based Tabular Data Generator for Constructing Synopsis in Approximate Query Processing: Challenges and Solutions

In data-driven systems, data exploration is imperative for making real-time decisions. However, big data is stored in massive databases that are difficult to retrieve. Approximate Query Processing (AQP) is a technique for providing approximate answers to aggregate queries based on a summary of the data (synopsis) that closely replicates the behavior of the actual data, which can be useful where an approximate answer to the queries would be acceptable in a fraction of the real execution time. In this paper, we discuss the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for generating tabular data that can be employed in AQP for synopsis construction. We first discuss the challenges associated with constructing synopses in relational databases and then introduce solutions to those challenges. Following that, we organized statistical metrics to evaluate the quality of the generated synopses. We conclude that tabular data complexity makes it difficult for algorithms to understand relational database semantics during training, and improved versions of tabular GANs are capable of constructing synopses to revolutionize data-driven decision-making systems.