Improving Diffusion Models for Class-imbalanced Training Data via Capacity Manipulation

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission2255 Authors

Keywords: Imbalance, Diffusion Models

Abstract: While diffusion models have achieved remarkable performance in image generation, they often struggle with the imbalanced datasets frequently encountered in real-world applications, resulting in significant performance degradation on minority classes. In this paper, we identify model capacity allocation as a key and previously underexplored factor contributing to this issue, providing a perspective that is orthogonal to existing research. Our empirical experiments and theoretical analysis reveal that majority classes monopolize an unnecessarily large portion of the model's capacity, thereby restricting the representation of minority classes. To address this, we propose Capacity Manipulation (CM), which explicitly reserves model capacity for minority classes. Our approach leverages a low-rank decomposition of model parameters and introduces a capacity manipulation loss to allocate appropriate capacity for capturing minority knowledge, thus enhancing minority class representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CM consistently and significantly improves the robustness of diffusion models on imbalanced datasets, and when combined with existing methods, further boosts overall performance.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 2255