Bridging the Data Gap: Source-Informed Task-Space Transport for Few-Shot Diffusion

Abstract

When an object category is well represented in one domain but scarcely observed in another, adapting a diffusion model to the target can be unreliable. Yet the same source-target relationship may have been observed for other categories. We ask whether this recurring relation can be learned and reused for a new semantic task. We introduce Meta-Diff, which embeds source and target distributions in a shared low-dimensional task space, learns an affine transport map across paired training tasks, and generates from the transported source coordinate using a shared diffusion backbone. At deployment, it requires source examples and the identity of a previously learned relation, but neither target images nor target-specific optimisation. Gaussian-mixture experiments examine how transfer depends on task information retained by the encoder, relation predictability and the size of the source--target shift. On held-out CIFAR-100 validation tasks, correct-source transport achieves 13.9% lower mean sliced Wasserstein distance than wrong-source transport. In the one-target final-test comparison, it achieves 14.7% lower mean distance than target-only adaptation and 32.7% lower than full fine-tuning under validation-selected settings. These gains have clear limits: directly applying the known corruption to clean-source generations performs better on CIFAR, and requested-class identity remains weak. Office-Home shows domain alignment without reliable object identity; clinical stress tests show no resolved source-specific advantage. The results characterise when reusable task-space relations help and where their generative limitations remain.