Enhance Image Classification via Inter-Class Image Mixup with Diffusion Model
Authors: Zhicai Wang, Longhui Wei, Tan Wang, Heyu Chen, Yanbin Hao, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He, Qi Tian

Text-to-image (T2I) generative models have recently emerged as a powerful tool enabling the creation of photo-realistic images and giving rise to a multitude of applications. However the effective integration of T2I models into fundamental image classification tasks remains an open question. A prevalent strategy to bolster image classification performance is through augmenting the training set with synthetic images generated by T2I models. In this study we scrutinize the shortcomings of both current generative and conventional data augmentation techniques. Our analysis reveals that these methods struggle to produce images that are both faithful (in terms of foreground objects) and diverse (in terms of background contexts) for domain-specific concepts. To tackle this challenge we introduce an innovative inter-class data augmentation method known as Diff-Mix (\href https://github.com/Zhicaiwww/Diff-Mix) https://github.com/Zhicaiwww/Diff-Mix   which enriches the dataset by performing image translations between classes. Our empirical results demonstrate that Diff-Mix achieves a better balance between faithfulness and diversity leading to a marked improvement in performance across diverse image classification scenarios including few-shot conventional and long-tail classifications for domain-specific datasets.