Stable Attribute Group Editing for Reliable Few-Shot Image Generation

Few-shot image generation aims to generate data of an unseen category based on only a few samples. Apart from basic content generation, a bunch of downstream applications hopefully benefit from this task, such as low-data detection and few-shot classification. To achieve this goal, the generated images should guarantee category retention for classification beyond the visual quality and diversity. In our preliminary work, we present an “editing-based” framework, Attribute Group Editing (AGE), for reliable few-shot image generation, which largely improves the performance compared with existing methods that require re-training a GAN with limited data. Nevertheless, AGE’s performance on downstream classification is not as satisfactory as expected. Furthermore, existing generative models suffer from similar issues. This paper focuses on addressing the issue of universal class inconsistency in all generative models. It not only improves AGE to enhance its ability to preserve class information but also conducts a comprehensive analysis of the causes of this problem in generative models from multiple perspectives, proposing potential directions for resolution. We first propose Stable Attribute Group Editing (SAGE) for more stable class-relevant image generation. SAGE corrects the inaccurate assumptions in AGE and leverages the distribution information from seen categories to accurately estimate the data distribution of unseen categories, thereby eliminating the class inconsistency issue in the generated data. We apply SAGE to both GANs and diffusion models to verify its flexibility and further achieve promising generation performance. Going one step further, we find that even though the generated images look photo-realistic and require no category-relevant editing, they are usually of limited help for downstream classification. We systematically discuss this issue from both the generation and classification perspectives, and propose to boost the downstream classification performance of SAGE by enhancing the pixel and frequency components. Extensive experiments provide valuable insights into extending image generation to wider downstream applications. Codes are available at https://github.com/UniBester/SAGE.