只用30%-40%数据做针对性生成,效果却超过全量合成数据。
Do We Need All the Synthetic Data? Targeted Image Augmentation via Diffusion Models
- 挑出训练初期难学样本,用扩散模型生成语义一致的增强图像。
- 仅扩增30%-40%数据,分类准确率最高提升2.8%。
- 适合追求高效增广、资源有限的模型训练场景。
使用扩散模型合成数据以增强图像分类器的泛化能力已成为有效策略。然而,现有方法通常将数据集规模扩大10-30倍,且难以保证生成多样性,导致计算开销巨大。本文提出TADA(TArgeted Diffusion Augmentation)框架,通过识别训练初期未被充分学习的样本,生成保留语义特征但噪声变化的忠实合成图像进行选择性增强。理论分析表明,TADA通过促进特征学习速度的一致性提升泛化能力,同时不放大噪声。大量实验显示,仅对30%-40%训练数据进行增强,TADA在CIFAR-10/100、TinyImageNet和ImageNet上,对ResNet、ViT、ConvNeXt、Swin Transformer等架构均实现最高2.8%的性能提升,使用SGD和SAM优化器均有效。值得注意的是,TADA+SGD在CIFAR-100和TinyImageNet上优于当前最优的SAM。此外,该方法在目标检测任务中也展现出显著改进,证明其可推广至图像分类之外。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Synthetically augmenting training datasets with diffusion models has become an effective strategy for improving the generalization of image classifiers. However, existing approaches typically increase dataset size by 10-30x and struggle to ensure generation diversity, leading to substantial computational overhead. In this work, we introduce TADA (TArgeted Diffusion Augmentation), a principled framework that selectively augments examples that are not learned early in training using faithful synthetic images that preserve semantic features while varying noise. We show that augmenting only this targeted subset consistently outperforms augmenting the entire dataset. Through theoretical analysis on a two-layer CNN, we prove that TADA improves generalization by promoting homogeneity in feature learning speed without amplifying noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that by augmenting only 30-40% of the training data, TADA improves generalization by up to 2.8% across diverse architectures including ResNet, ViT, ConvNeXt, and Swin Transformer on CIFAR-10/100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet, using optimizers such as SGD and SAM. Notably, TADA combined with SGD outperforms the state-of-the-art optimizer SAM on CIFAR-100 and TinyImageNet. Furthermore, TADA shows promising improvements on object detection benchmarks, demonstrating its applicability beyond image classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/BigML-CS-UCLA/TADA.
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