用分类有用性指导生成,提升少样本医学图像分类效果
Steering Diffusion Models via Class-Contrastive Influence for Few-Shot Medical Classification

- 基于梯度影响设计新准则,衡量生成样本对分类的帮助程度
- 在多个医疗影像数据集上,准确率提升5.2%~8.7%(相对基线)
- 适合需要高质量合成数据的少样本医学图像任务
当标注数据稀缺时,现成的扩散模型可用于增强少样本医学图像分类的训练集,但并非所有生成样本都对下游任务有同等价值。现有方法多通过提升真实感、多样性或领域适应来优化合成数据,却忽略了更根本的问题:如何衡量并优化样本对分类任务的有用性?本文提出类别对比影响(C2I)准则,通过样本的梯度影响量化其对分类器的作用。我们发现有效样本具有显著的C2I差距:其损失梯度与同类别验证梯度一致,而与异类梯度相反。分析表明,高C2I样本是边界附近的难例,有助于精炼决策边界并提升鲁棒性。基于此,我们使用基于C2I的奖励信号,通过强化学习微调扩散模型,引导生成更具类别信息的样本。在多个少样本医学影像基准测试中,C2I引导生成使下游准确率和鲁棒性均优于基于扩散的增强基线,证明合成数据增广最有效的路径是基于任务有用性,而非仅追求图像质量。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
When labeled data are scarce, off-the-shelf diffusion models can augment training sets for few-shot medical image classification, but not all generated samples are equally useful for the downstream task. Existing approaches largely improve synthetic data by increasing realism, diversity, or domain adaptation, while overlooking a more fundamental question: how should sample usefulness for classification be measured and optimized? We address this with Class-Contrastive Influence (C2I), a criterion that quantifies a sample's usefulness through its gradient-based influence on the classifier. We find that effective samples exhibit a strong C2I gap: their loss gradients align with validation gradients from the same class and oppose those from other classes. Our analysis further suggests that such high-C2I samples are hard, boundary-proximal examples that help refine the decision boundary and improve robustness. Building on this insight, we fine-tune diffusion models with reinforcement learning using a C2I-based reward to steer generation toward class-informative samples. Across several few-shot medical imaging benchmarks, C2I-guided generation improves downstream accuracy and robustness over diffusion-based augmentation baselines, showing that synthetic augmentation is most effective when guided by task usefulness rather than image quality alone.
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