Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable results in image processing tasks. However, their high expression ability risks overfitting. Consequently, data augmentation techniques have been proposed to prevent overfitting while enriching datasets. Recent CNN architectures with more parameters are rendering traditional data augmentation techniques insufficient. In this study, we propose a new data augmentation technique called random image cropping and patching (RICAP) which randomly crops four images and patches them to create a new training image. Moreover, RICAP mixes the class labels of the four images, resulting in an advantage similar to label smoothing. We evaluated RICAP with current state-of-the-art CNNs (e.g., the shake-shake regularization model) by comparison with competitive data augmentation techniques such as cutout and mixup. RICAP achieves a new state-of-the-art test error of @math on CIFAR-10. We also confirmed that deep CNNs with RICAP achieve better results on classification tasks using CIFAR-100 and ImageNet and an image-caption retrieval task using Microsoft COCO.
Data augmentation is an effective technique for improving the accuracy of modern image classifiers. However, current data augmentation implementations are manually designed. In this paper, we describe a simple procedure called AutoAugment to automatically search for improved data augmentation policies. In our implementation, we have designed a search space where a policy consists of many sub-policies, one of which is randomly chosen for each image in each mini-batch. A sub-policy consists of two operations, each operation being an image processing function such as translation, rotation, or shearing, and the probabilities and magnitudes with which the functions are applied. We use a search algorithm to find the best policy such that the neural network yields the highest validation accuracy on a target dataset. Our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet (without additional data). On ImageNet, we attain a Top-1 accuracy of 83.5 which is 0.4 better than the previous record of 83.1 . On CIFAR-10, we achieve an error rate of 1.5 , which is 0.6 better than the previous state-of-the-art. Augmentation policies we find are transferable between datasets. The policy learned on ImageNet transfers well to achieve significant improvements on other datasets, such as Oxford Flowers, Caltech-101, Oxford-IIT Pets, FGVC Aircraft, and Stanford Cars. Neural networks are powerful and flexible models that work well for many difficult learning tasks in image, speech and natural language understanding. Despite their success, neural networks are still hard to design. In this paper, we use a recurrent network to generate the model descriptions of neural networks and train this RNN with reinforcement learning to maximize the expected accuracy of the generated architectures on a validation set. On the CIFAR-10 dataset, our method, starting from scratch, can design a novel network architecture that rivals the best human-invented architecture in terms of test set accuracy. Our CIFAR-10 model achieves a test error rate of 3.65, which is 0.09 percent better and 1.05x faster than the previous state-of-the-art model that used a similar architectural scheme. On the Penn Treebank dataset, our model can compose a novel recurrent cell that outperforms the widely-used LSTM cell, and other state-of-the-art baselines. Our cell achieves a test set perplexity of 62.4 on the Penn Treebank, which is 3.6 perplexity better than the previous state-of-the-art model. The cell can also be transferred to the character language modeling task on PTB and achieves a state-of-the-art perplexity of 1.214.