Robustmix: Improving Robustness by Regularizing the Frequency Bias of Deep Nets

Abstract: Deep networks have achieved impressive results on a range of well-curated benchmark datasets. Surprisingly, their performance remains sensitive to perturbations that have little effect on human performance. In this work, we propose a novel extension of Mixup called Robustmix that regularizes networks to classify based on lower-frequency spatial features. We show that this type of regularization improves robustness on a range of benchmarks such as Imagenet-C and Stylized Imagenet. It adds little computational overhead and, furthermore, does not require a priori knowledge of a large set of image transformations. We find that this approach further complements recent advances in model architecture and data augmentation, attaining a state-of-the-art mCE of 44.8 with an EfficientNet-B8 model and RandAugment, which is a reduction of 16 mCE compared to the baseline.