Rethinking Data Augmentation under Covariate Shift: Invariant-Guided Diffusion and Prototype Reweighting

Abstract

In many industrial applications, 1) tabular data is scarce and imbalanced and thus requires synthetic expansion; 2) input distributions drift between training and deployment (covariate shift); 3) validation sets often diverge from unseen test environments; or 4) standard generative models simply mimic outdated source distributions. This learning setting limits the stability of standard augmentation and adaptation pipelines. We generalize the task under such setting as the Augmented and Weighted Learning under Covariate Shift problem (AWL-CS). AWL-CS imposes two critical challenges on existing methods: 1) misleading generative guidance where models optimize for source similarity rather than downstream task relevance, and 2) structural instability of distributional density where reweighting mechanisms overfit to noisy validation signals. To tackle these challenges, we propose IGDPR (Invariant-Guided Diffusion with Prototype Reweighting), a unified framework that synergizes stable synthesis and structural adaptation: i) To achieve task-relevant generation, we steer the diffusion sampling process using invariant potentials to ensure synthetic samples align with stable decision boundaries rather than outdated correlations. ii) To ensure stable adaptation, we develop a prototype-based reweighting strategy that assesses sample reliability through structural clusters instead of isolated points, effectively filtering validation noise. Extensive experiments on real data demonstrate our method improves data quality by augmenting the most beneficial data for robust learning.