Controlled Training Data Generation with Diffusion Models

We present a method to control a text-to-image generative model to produce training data useful for supervised learning. Unlike previous works that employ an open-loop approach via pre-defined prompts to generate new data using either a language model or human expertise, we develop an automated closed-loop system that involves two feedback mechanisms. The first mechanism uses feedback from a given supervised model to find adversarial prompts that result in generated images that maximize the model’s loss and, consequently, expose its vulnerabilities. While these adversarial prompts generate training examples curated for improving the given model, they are not curated for a specific target distribution of interest, which can be inefficient. Therefore, we introduce the second feedback mechanism that can optionally guide the generation process towards a desirable target distribution. We call the method combining these two mechanisms Guided Adversarial Prompts. The proposed closed-loop system allows us to control the training data generation for a given model and target image distribution (see Fig. 1 (Right)). We evaluate on different tasks, datasets, and architectures, with different types of distribution shifts (corruptions, spurious correlations, unseen domains) and illustrate the advantages of the proposed feedback mechanisms compared to open-loop approaches.