Data augmentation is usually adopted to increase the amount of training data, prevent overfitting and improve the performance of deep models. However, in practice, random data augmentation, such as random image cropping, is low-efficiency and might introduce many uncontrolled background noises. In this paper, we propose Weakly Supervised Data Augmentation Network (WS-DAN) to explore the potential of data augmentation. Specifically, for each training image, we first generate attention maps to represent the object's discriminative parts by weakly supervised learning. Next, we augment the image guided by these attention maps, including attention cropping and attention dropping. The proposed WS-DAN improves the classification accuracy in two folds. In the first stage, images can be seen better since more discriminative parts' features will be extracted. In the second stage, attention regions provide accurate location of object, which ensures our model to look at the object closer and further improve the performance. Comprehensive experiments in common fine-grained visual classification datasets show that our WS-DAN surpasses the state-of-the-art methods, which demonstrates its effectiveness.
Random data augmentation suffers from low efficiency and generating much uncontrolled noise data. To overcome these issue, a few methods have been proposed to take dataset distribution into consideration and augment data according to the feedback of the training dataset, which is more effective than a random distribution. Cubuk al proposed AutoAugmentation @cite_16 to create a search space of data augmentation policies. It can automatically design a specific policy so as to obtain state-of-the-art validation accuracy for target dataset. Peng al proposed Adversarial Data Augmentation @cite_43 to jointly optimize data augmentation and deep model. They designed an augmentation network to online generate data and improve the robustness of the deep model. However, their data specific augmentation designing process is significantly complicated than random augmentation. Our attention guided data augmentation is more simple and direct, which can be easily trained end-to-end.
@cite_43 @cite_16
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Random data augmentation is a critical technique to avoid overfitting in training deep models. Yet, data augmentation and network training are often two isolated processes in most settings, yielding to a suboptimal training. Why not jointly optimize the two? We propose adversarial data augmentation to address this limitation. The key idea is to design a generator (e.g. an augmentation network) that competes against a discriminator (e.g. a target network) by generating hard examples online. The generator explores weaknesses of the discriminator, while the discriminator learns from hard augmentations to achieve better performance. A reward penalty strategy is also proposed for efficient joint training. We investigate human pose estimation and carry out comprehensive ablation studies to validate our method. The results prove that our method can effectively improve state-of-the-art models without additional data effort. Random data augmentation is a critical technique to avoid overfitting in training deep neural network models. However, data augmentation and network training are usually treated as two isolated processes, limiting the effectiveness of network training. Why not jointly optimize the two? We propose adversarial data augmentation to address this limitation. The main idea is to design an augmentation network (generator) that competes against a target network (discriminator) by generating hard' augmentation operations online. The augmentation network explores the weaknesses of the target network, while the latter learns from hard' augmentations to achieve better performance. We also design a reward penalty strategy for effective joint training. We demonstrate our approach on the problem of human pose estimation and carry out a comprehensive experimental analysis, showing that our method can significantly improve state-of-the-art models without additional data efforts. Effective training of neural networks requires much data. In the low-data regime, parameters are underdetermined, and learnt networks generalise poorly. Data Augmentation krizhevsky2012imagenet alleviates this by using existing data more effectively. However standard data augmentation produces only limited plausible alternative data. Given there is potential to generate a much broader set of augmentations, we design and train a generative model to do data augmentation. The model, based on image conditional Generative Adversarial Networks, takes data from a source domain and learns to take any data item and generalise it to generate other within-class data items. As this generative process does not depend on the classes themselves, it can be applied to novel unseen classes of data. We show that a Data Augmentation Generative Adversarial Network (DAGAN) augments standard vanilla classifiers well. We also show a DAGAN can enhance few-shot learning systems such as Matching Networks. We demonstrate these approaches on Omniglot, on EMNIST having learnt the DAGAN on Omniglot, and VGG-Face data. In our experiments we can see over 13 increase in accuracy in the low-data regime experiments in Omniglot (from 69 to 82 ), EMNIST (73.9 to 76 ) and VGG-Face (4.5 to 12 ); in Matching Networks for Omniglot we observe an increase of 0.5 (from 96.9 to 97.4 ) and an increase of 1.8 in EMNIST (from 59.5 to 61.3 ). Data augmentation is an essential part of the training process applied to deep learning models. The motivation is that a robust training process for deep learning models depends on large annotated datasets, which are expensive to be acquired, stored and processed. Therefore a reasonable alternative is to be able to automatically generate new annotated training samples using a process known as data augmentation. The dominant data augmentation approach in the field assumes that new training samples can be obtained via random geometric or appearance transformations applied to annotated training samples, but this is a strong assumption because it is unclear if this is a reliable generative model for producing new training samples. In this paper, we provide a novel Bayesian formulation to data augmentation, where new annotated training points are treated as missing variables and generated based on the distribution learned from the training set. For learning, we introduce a theoretically sound algorithm --- generalised Monte Carlo expectation maximisation, and demonstrate one possible implementation via an extension of the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Classification results on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 show the better performance of our proposed method compared to the current dominant data augmentation approach mentioned above --- the results also show that our approach produces better classification results than similar GAN models.