Synthetic Data from Diffusion Models Improves ImageNet Classification

Published: 02 Nov 2023, Last Modified: 17 Sept 2024Accepted by TMLREveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: Deep generative models are becoming increasingly powerful, now generating diverse, high fidelity, photo-realistic samples given text prompts. Nevertheless, samples from such models have not been shown to significantly improve model training for challenging and well-studied discriminative tasks like ImageNet classification. In this paper we show that augmenting the ImageNet training set with samples from a generative diffusion model can yield substantial improvements in ImageNet classification accuracy over strong ResNet and Vision Transformer baselines. To this end we explore the fine-tuning of large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, yielding class-conditional ImageNet models with state-of-the-art FID score (1.76 at 256×256 resolution) and Inception Score (239 at 256×256). The model also yields a new state-of-the-art in Classification Accuracy Scores, i.e., ImageNet test accuracy for a ResNet-50 architecture trained solely on synthetic data (64.96 top-1 accuracy for 256×256 samples, improving to 69.24 for 1024×1024 samples). Adding up to three times as many synthetic samples as real training samples consistently improves ImageNet classification accuracy across multiple architectures.
Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)
Changes Since Last Submission: N/A
Supplementary Material: pdf
Assigned Action Editor: ~Valentin_De_Bortoli1
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Submission Number: 1424
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