Few-shot Image Generation with Diffusion Models

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) have been proven capable of synthesizing high-quality images with remarkable diversity when trained on large amounts of data. However, to our knowledge, few-shot image generation tasks have yet to be studied with DDPM-based approaches. Modern approaches are mainly built on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and adapt models pre-trained on large source domains to target domains using a few available samples. In this paper, we make the first attempt to study when do DDPMs overfit and suffer severe diversity degradation as training data become scarce. Then we propose to adapt DDPMs pre-trained on large source domains to target domains using limited data. Our results show that utilizing knowledge from pre-trained DDPMs can significantly accelerate convergence and improve the quality and diversity of the generated images. Moreover, we propose a DDPM-based pairwise similarity loss to preserve the relative distances between generated samples during domain adaptation. In this way, we further improve the generation diversity of the proposed DDPM-based approaches. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches qualitatively and quantitatively on a series of few-shot image generation tasks and achieve results better than current state-of-the-art GAN-based approaches in quality and diversity.