# Usefulness of Quantile-Aware Diffusion Modeling for Highly Imbalanced Tabular Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05825 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05825/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 13 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion foundations and sampling](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-foundations-and-sampling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Deep Learning Models for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11959/) (2021)
- [Argmax Flows and Multinomial Diffusion: Learning Categorical Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05379/) (2021)
- [TabDDPM: Modelling Tabular Data with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15421/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08702/) (2023)
- [Continuous Diffusion for Mixed-Type Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10431/) (2023)
- [Credit card fraud detection using machine learning: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06479/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Classification problem in the context of highly imbalanced data is a major challenge in many real-world applications (e.g., FinTech, healthcare, etc.). In these cases, the vast majority of instances belong to a single class and a small fraction represent the minority class (often the most critical class). Recently, diffusion models have emerged as powerful approaches to reduce the degree of ``imbalanced-ness'' in the dataset; they work by generating synthetic data by capturing complex data distributions using iterative transformations. However, standard diffusion models are not inherently suited to highly skewed or heavy-tailed data, due to inbuilt quadratic error loss, which lacks the structural sensitivity to capture rare, extreme values, and minority-class nuances. We propose a novel approach, namely, Quantile-TabDDPM, based on a quantile-regularized denoising objective that combines the standard quadratic error loss with a quantile loss term to explicitly capture rare events while preserving the theoretical grounding of the original denoising objective. We extensively evaluated our approach on a real-world credit card transaction dataset characterized by extreme class imbalance. The results demonstrate that the integration of diffusion-based synthetic data generation with a quantile-regularized denoising objective provides a robust and effective framework for fraud detection in highly imbalanced datasets.