# FLORA: Efficient Synthetic Data Generation for Object Detection in Low-Data Regimes via finetuning Flux LoRA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21712 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21712/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 30 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07339/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Large Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14608/) (2024)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models with Exponential Integrator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13902/) (2022)
- [ReCo: Region-Controlled Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15518/) (2022)
- [InstanceDiffusion: Instance-level Control for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03290/) (2024)
- [Effectively Unbiased FID and Inception Score and where to find them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07023/) (2019)
- [Understanding How Image Quality Affects Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04004/) (2016)
- [GeoDiffusion: Text-Prompted Geometric Control for Object Detection Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04607/) (2023)
- [Roboflow 100: A Rich, Multi-Domain Object Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13523/) (2022)
- [DiffusionEngine: Diffusion Model is Scalable Data Engine for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03893/) (2023)
- [ODGEN: Domain-specific Object Detection Data Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15199/) (2024)
- [SUSTechGAN: Image Generation for Object Detection in Adverse Conditions of Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01430/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated significant potential in augmenting scarce datasets for object detection tasks. Nevertheless, most recent models rely on resource-intensive full fine-tuning of large-scale diffusion models, requiring enterprise-grade GPUs (e.g., NVIDIA V100) and thousands of synthetic images. To address these limitations, we propose Flux LoRA Augmentation (FLORA), a lightweight synthetic data generation pipeline. Our approach uses the Flux 1.1 Dev diffusion model, fine-tuned exclusively through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). This dramatically reduces computational requirements, enabling synthetic dataset generation with a consumer-grade GPU (e.g., NVIDIA RTX 4090). We empirically evaluate our approach on seven diverse object detection datasets. Our results demonstrate that training object detectors with just 500 synthetic images generated by our approach yields superior detection performance compared to models trained on 5000 synthetic images from the ODGEN baseline, achieving improvements of up to 21.3% in mAP@.50:.95. This work demonstrates that it is possible to surpass state-of-the-art performance with far greater efficiency, as FLORA achieves superior results using only 10% of the data and a fraction of the computational cost. This work demonstrates that a quality and efficiency-focused approach is more effective than brute-force generation, making advanced synthetic data creation more practical and accessible for real-world scenarios.