Work

Masked Autoencoders are Robust Data Augmentors

Year: 2022
Type: preprint
Abstract: Deep neural networks are capable of learning powerful representations to tackle complex vision tasks but expose undesirable properties like the over-fitting issue. To this end, regularization techniques like image augmentation are necessary for deep neural networks to generalize well. Nevertheless, most prevalent image augmentation recipes confine themselves to off-the-shelf linear transformations like scale, flip, and colorjitter. Due to their hand-crafted property, these augmentations are insufficient to generate truly hard augmented examples. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective of augmentation to regularize the training process. Inspired by the recent success of applying masked image modeling to self-supervised learning, we adopt the self-supervised masked autoencoder to generate the distorted view of the input images. We show that utilizing such model-based nonlinear transformation as data augmentation can improve high-level recognition tasks. We term the proposed method as \textbf{M}ask-\textbf{R}econstruct \textbf{A}ugmentation (MRA). The extensive experiments on various image classification benchmarks verify the effectiveness of the proposed augmentation. Specifically, MRA consistently enhances the performance on supervised, semi-supervised as well as few-shot classification.
Authors: Xu, Haohang, Ding, Shuangrui, Zhao, Manqi, Jiang, Dongsheng
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4282813448
Cites:
Cited by: 25
Related to: 10