Mitigating Long-Tail Bias via Prompt-Controlled Diffusion Augmentation

Long-tailed class imbalance remains a fundamental obstacle in semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote-sensing imagery, where dominant classes shape learned representations and rare classes are systematically under-segmented. This challenge becomes more acute in cross-domain settings such as LoveDA, which exhibits an explicit Urban/Rural split with substantial appearance differences and inconsistent class-frequency statistics across domains. We propose a prompt-controlled diffusion augmentation framework that generates paired label-image samples with explicit control over semantic composition and domain, enabling targeted enrichment of underrepresented classes rather than indiscriminate dataset expansion. A domain-aware, masked, ratio-conditioned discrete diffusion model first synthesizes layouts that satisfy class-ratio targets while preserving realistic spatial co-occurrence, and a ControlNet-guided diffusion model then renders photorealistic, domain-consistent images from these layouts. When mixed with real data, the resulting synthetic pairs improve multiple segmentation backbones, especially on minority classes and under domain shift, showing that better downstream segmentation comes from adding the right samples in the right proportions. Source codes, pretrained models, and synthetic datasets are available at \href{https://buddhi19.github.io/SyntheticGen}{\texttt{buddhi19.github.io/SyntheticGen}}.

Buddhi Wijenayake, Nichula Wasalathilake, Roshan Godaliyadda, Vijitha Herath, Parakrama Ekanayake, Vishal M. Patel · 2026