Sample-Efficient Multi-Round Generative Data Augmentation for Long-Tail Instance Segmentation

Data synthesis has become increasingly crucial for long-tail instance segmentation tasks to mitigate class imbalance and high annotation costs. Previous methods have primarily prioritized the selection of data from a pre-generated image object pool, which frequently leads to the inefficient utilization of generated data. To address this inefficiency, we propose a collaborative approach that incorporates feedback from an instance segmentation model to guide the augmentation process. Specifically, the diffusion model uses feedback to generate objects that exhibit high uncertainty. The number and size of synthesized objects for each class are dynamically adjusted based on the model state to improve learning in underrepresented classes. This augmentation process is further strengthened by running multiple rounds, allowing feedback to be refined throughout training. In summary, multi-round collaborative augmentation (MRCA) enhances sample efficiency by providing optimal synthetic data at the right moment. Our framework requires only 6% of the data generation needed by state-of-the-art methods while outperforming them.

• Corresponding author 1 While we designate instance segmentation as our target task, object detection is equally relevant. 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025).