Dataset Augmentation in Feature Space
This addresses the need for more general and reusable augmentation methods in supervised learning, though it is incremental as it builds on existing representation learning techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of domain-specific limitations in dataset augmentation by proposing a domain-agnostic approach that applies simple transformations in a learned feature space, demonstrating effectiveness for static and sequential data.
Dataset augmentation, the practice of applying a wide array of domain-specific transformations to synthetically expand a training set, is a standard tool in supervised learning. While effective in tasks such as visual recognition, the set of transformations must be carefully designed, implemented, and tested for every new domain, limiting its re-use and generality. In this paper, we adopt a simpler, domain-agnostic approach to dataset augmentation. We start with existing data points and apply simple transformations such as adding noise, interpolating, or extrapolating between them. Our main insight is to perform the transformation not in input space, but in a learned feature space. A re-kindling of interest in unsupervised representation learning makes this technique timely and more effective. It is a simple proposal, but to-date one that has not been tested empirically. Working in the space of context vectors generated by sequence-to-sequence models, we demonstrate a technique that is effective for both static and sequential data.