Automatic Data Augmentation by Learning the Deterministic Policy
This work addresses the challenge of automating data augmentation for deep learning practitioners, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The authors tackled the problem of defining optimal data augmentation by proposing DeepAugNet, a reinforcement learning method that sequentially generates augmented subsets to maximize performance gains, achieving significant improvements on small-scale datasets and comparable results on large-scale ones.
Aiming to produce sufficient and diverse training samples, data augmentation has been demonstrated for its effectiveness in training deep models. Regarding that the criterion of the best augmentation is challenging to define, we in this paper present a novel learning-based augmentation method termed as DeepAugNet, which formulates the final augmented data as a collection of several sequentially augmented subsets. Specifically, the current augmented subset is required to maximize the performance improvement compared with the last augmented subset by learning the deterministic augmentation policy using deep reinforcement learning. By introducing an unified optimization goal, DeepAugNet intends to combine the data augmentation and the deep model training in an end-to-end training manner which is realized by simultaneously training a hybrid architecture of dueling deep Q-learning algorithm and a surrogate deep model. We extensively evaluated our proposed DeepAugNet on various benchmark datasets including Fashion MNIST, CUB, CIFAR-100 and WebCaricature. Compared with the current state-of-the-arts, our method can achieve a significant improvement in small-scale datasets, and a comparable performance in large-scale datasets. Code will be available soon.