An Efficient Framework for Crediting Data Contributors of Diffusion Models

As diffusion models are deployed in real-world settings, and their performance is driven by training data, appraising the contribution of data contributors is crucial to creating incentives for sharing quality data and to implementing policies for data compensation. Depending on the use case, model performance corresponds to various global properties of the distribution learned by a diffusion model (e.g., overall aesthetic quality). Hence, here we address the problem of attributing global properties of diffusion models to data contributors. The Shapley value provides a principled approach to valuation by uniquely satisfying game-theoretic axioms of fairness. However, estimating Shapley values for diffusion models is computationally impractical because it requires retraining on many training data subsets corresponding to different contributors and rerunning inference. We introduce a method to efficiently retrain and rerun inference for Shapley value estimation, by leveraging model pruning and fine-tuning. We evaluate the utility of our method with three use cases: (i) image quality for a DDPM trained on a CIFAR dataset, (ii) demographic diversity for an LDM trained on CelebA-HQ, and (iii) aesthetic quality for a Stable Diffusion model LoRA-finetuned on Post-Impressionist artworks. Our results empirically demonstrate that our framework can identify important data contributors across models' global properties, outperforming existing attribution methods for diffusion models 1 .