Specialist Diffusion: Plug-and-Play Sample-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models to Learn Any Unseen Style

Diffusion models have demonstrated impressive capability of text-conditioned image synthesis, and broader application horizons are emerging by personalizing those pretrained diffusion models toward generating some specialized target object or style. In this paper, we aim to learn an unseen style by simply fine-tuning a pre-trained diffusion model with a handful of images (e.g., less than 10), so that the fine-tuned model can generate high-quality images of arbitrary objects in this style. Such extremely lowshot fine-tuning is accomplished by a novel toolkit of finetuning techniques, including text-to-image customized data augmentations, a content loss to facilitate content-style disentanglement, and sparse updating that focuses on only a few time steps. Our framework, dubbed Specialist Diffusion, is plug-and-play to existing diffusion model backbones and other personalization techniques. We demonstrate it to outperform the latest few-shot personalization alternatives of diffusion models such as Textual Inversion [7] and DreamBooth [24], in terms of learning highly sophisticated styles with ultra-sample-efficient tuning. We further show that Specialist Diffusion can be integrated on top of textual inversion to boost performance further, even on highly unusual styles.