Training on Thin Air: Improve Image Classification with Generated Data

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.

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Robust Image Super-Resolution in the Wild

Diffusion models have shown promising results on single-image super-resolution and other image- to-image translation tasks. Despite this success, they have not outperformed state-of-the-art GAN models on the more challenging blind super-resolution task, where the input images are out of distribution, with unknown degradations. This paper introduces SR3+, a diffusion-based model for blind super-resolution, establishing a new state-of-the-art. To this end, we advocate self-supervised training with a combination of composite, parameterized degradations for self-supervised training, and noise-conditioing augmentation during training and testing. With these innovations, a large-scale convolutional architecture, and large-scale datasets, SR3+ greatly outperforms SR3. It outperforms Real-ESRGAN when trained on the same data, with a DRealSR FID score of 36.82 vs. 37.22, which further improves to FID of 32.37 with larger models, and further still with larger training sets.