AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data

In this paper, we take a closer look at data augmentation for images, and describe a simple procedure called AutoAugment to search for improved data augmentation policies. Our key insight is to create a search space of data augmentation policies, evaluating the quality of a particular policy directly on the dataset of interest. In our implementation, we have designed a search space where a policy consists of many sub-policies, one of which is randomly chosen for each image in each mini-batch. A sub-policy consists of two operations, each operation being an image processing function such as translation, rotation, or shearing, and the probabilities and magnitudes with which the functions are applied. We use a search algorithm to find the best policy such that the neural network yields the highest validation accuracy on a target dataset. Our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet (without additional data). On ImageNet, we attain a Top-1 accuracy of 83.54%. On CIFAR-10, we achieve an error rate of 1.48%, which is 0.65% better than the previous state-of-the-art. Finally, policies learned from one dataset can be transferred to work well on other similar datasets. For example, the policy learned on ImageNet allows us to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the fine grained visual classification dataset Stanford Cars, without fine-tuning weights pre-trained on additional data. Code to train Wide-ResNet, Shake-Shake and ShakeDrop models with AutoAugment policies can be found at https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/autoaugment