OntoAug: Rethinking Generative Data Augmentation via Ontology Guidance

Abstract

Generative data augmentation has created new opportunities for improving image recognition models. Despite these advances, most existing augmentation methods process images holistically, without accounting for the uneven distribution of discriminative information in classification tasks, where foreground subjects typically contain richer category-relevant signals than background context. Ignoring this imbalance can introduce unintended semantic shifts in generated samples, thereby weakening the model's ability to capture the intrinsic ontology of the target object. In fact, human perception operates in a similar manner: subject identity remains stable, while contextual variations are naturally tolerated as long as overall coherence is preserved. Inspired by this observation, we propose OntoAug, an ontology-oriented data augmentation framework that explicitly distinguishes between subject and environment. OntoAug separates foreground and background through structured layout control and guides diffusion models to generate samples with consistent subjects and diverse contextual variations. By explicitly introducing foreground masks and diverse background prompts during the generation process, the framework enhances both semantic fidelity and diversity in the synthesized data. Extensive experiments show that OntoAug achieves strong performance across multiple tasks, including image classification, few-shot learning, weakly supervised object localization (WSOL), and large vision-language model reasoning.