IPF-RDA: An Information-Preserving Framework for Robust Data Augmentation

Abstract: Data augmentation is widely utilized as an effective technique to enhance the generalization performance of deep models. However, data augmentation may inevitably introduce distribution shifts and noises, which significantly constrain the potential and deteriorate the performance of deep networks. To this end, we propose a novel information-preserving framework, namely IPF-RDA, to enhance the robustness of data augmentations in this paper. IPF-RDA combines the proposal of (i) a new class-discriminative information estimation algorithm that identifies the points most vulnerable to data augmentation operations and corresponding importance scores; And (ii) a new information-preserving scheme that preserves the critical information in the augmented samples and ensures the diversity of augmented data adaptively. We divide data augmentation methods into three categories according to the operation types and integrate these approaches into our framework accordingly. After being integrated into our framework, the robustness of data augmentation methods can be enhanced and their full potential can be unleashed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that although being simple, IPF-RDA consistently improves the performance of numerous commonly used state-of-the-art data augmentation methods with popular deep models on a variety of datasets, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, CUHK03, Market1501, Oxford Flower, and MNIST, where its performance and scalability are stressed. The implementation is available at https://github.com/Jackbrocp/IPF-RDA.