Training on Thin Air: Improve Image Classification with Generated Data
Yongchao Zhou Hshmat Sahak Jimmy Ba
Acquiring high-quality data for training discriminative models is a crucial
yet challenging aspect of building effective predictive systems. In this paper,
we present Diffusion Inversion, a simple yet effective method that leverages
the pre-trained generative model, Stable Diffusion, to generate diverse,
high-quality training data for image classification. Our approach captures the
original data distribution and ensures data coverage by inverting images to the
latent space of Stable Diffusion, and generates diverse novel training images
by conditioning the generative model on noisy versions of these vectors. We
identify three key components that allow our generated images to successfully
supplant the original dataset, leading to a 2-3x enhancement in sample
complexity and a 6.5x decrease in sampling time. Moreover, our approach
consistently outperforms generic prompt-based steering methods and KNN
retrieval baseline across a wide range of datasets. Additionally, we
demonstrate the compatibility of our approach with widely-used data
augmentation techniques, as well as the reliability of the generated data in
supporting various neural architectures and enhancing few-shot learning.