No Arabic abstract
Data augmentation is a key practice in machine learning for improving generalization performance. However, finding the best data augmentation hyperparameters requires domain knowledge or a computationally demanding search. We address this issue by proposing an efficient approach to automatically train a network that learns an effective distribution of transformations to improve its generalization. Using bilevel optimization, we directly optimize the data augmentation parameters using a validation set. This framework can be used as a general solution to learn the optimal data augmentation jointly with an end task model like a classifier. Results show that our joint training method produces an image classification accuracy that is comparable to or better than carefully hand-crafted data augmentation. Yet, it does not need an expensive external validation loop on the data augmentation hyperparameters.
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are capable of learning robust representation with different regularization methods and activations as convolutional layers are spatially correlated. Based on this property, a large variety of regional dropout strategies have been proposed, such as Cutout, DropBlock, CutMix, etc. These methods aim to promote the network to generalize better by partially occluding the discriminative parts of objects. However, all of them perform this operation randomly, without capturing the most important region(s) within an object. In this paper, we propose Attentive CutMix, a naturally enhanced augmentation strategy based on CutMix. In each training iteration, we choose the most descriptive regions based on the intermediate attention maps from a feature extractor, which enables searching for the most discriminative parts in an image. Our proposed method is simple yet effective, easy to implement and can boost the baseline significantly. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet datasets with various CNN architectures (in a unified setting) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which consistently outperforms the baseline CutMix and other methods by a significant margin.
Contemporary Artificial Intelligence technologies allow for the employment of Computer Vision to discern good crops from bad, providing a step in the pipeline of selecting healthy fruit from undesirable fruit, such as those which are mouldy or gangrenous. State-of-the-art works in the field report high accuracy results on small datasets (<1000 images), which are not representative of the population regarding real-world usage. The goals of this study are to further enable real-world usage by improving generalisation with data augmentation as well as to reduce overfitting and energy usage through model pruning. In this work, we suggest a machine learning pipeline that combines the ideas of fine-tuning, transfer learning, and generative model-based training data augmentation towards improving fruit quality image classification. A linear network topology search is performed to tune a VGG16 lemon quality classification model using a publicly-available dataset of 2690 images. We find that appending a 4096 neuron fully connected layer to the convolutional layers leads to an image classification accuracy of 83.77%. We then train a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network on the training data for 2000 epochs, and it learns to generate relatively realistic images. Grad-CAM analysis of the model trained on real photographs shows that the synthetic images can exhibit classifiable characteristics such as shape, mould, and gangrene. A higher image classification accuracy of 88.75% is then attained by augmenting the training with synthetic images, arguing that Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks have the ability to produce new data to alleviate issues of data scarcity. Finally, model pruning is performed via polynomial decay, where we find that the Conditional GAN-augmented classification network can retain 81.16% classification accuracy when compressed to 50% of its original size.
Due to the difficulty in acquiring massive task-specific occluded images, the classification of occluded images with deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) remains highly challenging. To alleviate the dependency on large-scale occluded image datasets, we propose a novel approach to improve the classification accuracy of occluded images by fine-tuning the pre-trained models with a set of augmented deep feature vectors (DFVs). The set of augmented DFVs is composed of original DFVs and pseudo-DFVs. The pseudo-DFVs are generated by randomly adding difference vectors (DVs), extracted from a small set of clean and occluded image pairs, to the real DFVs. In the fine-tuning, the back-propagation is conducted on the DFV data flow to update the network parameters. The experiments on various datasets and network structures show that the deep feature augmentation significantly improves the classification accuracy of occluded images without a noticeable influence on the performance of clean images. Specifically, on the ILSVRC2012 dataset with synthetic occluded images, the proposed approach achieves 11.21% and 9.14% average increases in classification accuracy for the ResNet50 networks fine-tuned on the occlusion-exclusive and occlusion-inclusive training sets, respectively.
Pedestrian attribute recognition is an important multi-label classification problem. Although the convolutional neural networks are prominent in learning discriminative features from images, the data imbalance in multi-label setting for fine-grained tasks remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a new re-sampling algorithm called: data augmentation imbalance (DAI) to explicitly enhance the ability to discriminate the fewer attributes via increasing the proportion of labels accounting for a small part. Fundamentally, by applying over-sampling and under-sampling on the multi-label dataset at the same time, the thought of robbing the rich attributes and helping the poor makes a significant contribution to DAI. Extensive empirical evidence shows that our DAI algorithm achieves state-of-the-art results, based on pedestrian attribute datasets, i.e. standard PA-100K and PETA datasets.
State-of-the-art video action classifiers often suffer from overfitting. They tend to be biased towards specific objects and scene cues, rather than the foreground action content, leading to sub-optimal generalization performances. Recent data augmentation strategies have been reported to address the overfitting problems in static image classifiers. Despite the effectiveness on the static image classifiers, data augmentation has rarely been studied for videos. For the first time in the field, we systematically analyze the efficacy of various data augmentation strategies on the video classification task. We then propose a powerful augmentation strategy VideoMix. VideoMix creates a new training video by inserting a video cuboid into another video. The ground truth labels are mixed proportionally to the number of voxels from each video. We show that VideoMix lets a model learn beyond the object and scene biases and extract more robust cues for action recognition. VideoMix consistently outperforms other augmentation baselines on Kinetics and the challenging Something-Something-V2 benchmarks. It also improves the weakly-supervised action localization performance on THUMOS14. VideoMix pretrained models exhibit improved accuracies on the video detection task (AVA).