Improving Diffusion-Based Augmentation for Data-Scarce Image Classification via Mask-Guided Reference Attention and Repulsive Noise Optimization

Abstract

Diffusion-based data augmentation has emerged as a powerful strategy for addressing data-scarce image classification. Recent pipelines typically adapt a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model to a limited number of class examples and subsequently sample synthetic images using diverse textual prompts. However, in extreme data-scarce regimes such as long-tailed single-sample settings, this approach suffers from a dual failure mode: the generated samples often lack discriminative foreground details crucial for classifier training, and the adapted class prior can bias the early denoising process, causing output images to exhibit similar patterns despite varying text prompts. To overcome these limitations, we propose a sampling-side framework of two complementary components that simultaneously enhance fine details and diversity. First, Mask-Guided Reference (MGR) Attention updates only foreground value tokens with reference features via zero-shot segmentation, limiting reference influence to the target object and mitigating excessive global feature injection. Second, Repulsive Noise Optimization (RNO) encourages initial noise trajectories to diverge from dominant generative modes of the adapted model, enabling target prompts to express broader contextual variation. Extensive evaluations show consistent improvements, with the largest gains in long-tailed single-sample settings of up to 2.50 and 2.94 points on CUB-LT IF100, and further robustness across few-shot and background-shift evaluations.