A2-Aug: Adaptive Automated Data Augmentation

Data augmentation is a promising way to enhance the generalization ability of deep learning models. Many proxy-free and proxy-based automated augmentation methods are proposed to search for the best augmentation for target datasets. However, the proxy-free methods require lots of searching overhead, while the proxy-based methods introduce optimization gaps with the actual task. In this paper, we explore a new proxy-free approach that only needs a small number of searches (~ 5 vs 100 of RandAugment) to alleviate these issues. Specifically, we propose Adaptive Automated Augmentation (A2 -Aug), a simple and effective proxy-free framework, which seeks to mine the adaptive ensemble knowledge of multiple augmentations to further improve the adaptability of each candidate augmentation. Firstly, A2 -Aug automatically learns the ensemble logit from multiple candidate augmentations, which is jointly optimized and adaptive to target tasks. Secondly, the adaptive ensemble logit is used to distill each logit of input augmentation via KL divergence. In this way, these a few candidate augmentations can implicitly learn strong adaptability for the target datasets, which enjoy similar effects with many searches of RandAugment. Finally, equipped with joint training via separate BatchNorm and normalized distillation, A2-Aug obtains state-of-the-art performance with less training budget. In experiments, our A2 -Aug achieves 4% performance gain on CIFAR-100, which substantially outperforms other methods. On ImageNet, we obtain a top-1 accuracy of 79.2% for ResNet-50, a 1.6% boosting over the AutoAugment with at least 25× faster training speed.