In many machine learning applications, it is important for the model to provide confidence scores that accurately capture its prediction uncertainty. Although modern learning methods have achieved great success in predictive accuracy, generating calibrated confidence scores remains a major challenge. Mixup, a popular yet simple data augmentation technique based on taking convex combinations of pairs of training examples, has been empirically found to significantly improve confidence calibration across diverse applications. However, when and how Mixup helps calibration is still a mystery. In this paper, we theoretically prove that Mixup improves calibration in \textit{high-dimensional} settings by investigating natural statistical models. Interestingly, the calibration benefit of Mixup increases as the model capacity increases. We support our theories with experiments on common architectures and datasets. In addition, we study how Mixup improves calibration in semi-supervised learning. While incorporating unlabeled data can sometimes make the model less calibrated, adding Mixup training mitigates this issue and provably improves calibration. Our analysis provides new insights and a framework to understand Mixup and calibration.
A well-calibrated neural model produces confidence (probability outputs) closely approximated by the expected accuracy. While prior studies have shown that mixup training as a data augmentation technique can improve model calibration on image classification tasks, little is known about using mixup for model calibration on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. In this paper, we explore mixup for model calibration on several NLU tasks and propose a novel mixup strategy for pre-trained language models that improves model calibration further. Our proposed mixup is guided by both the Area Und…
MixUp is a computer vision data augmentation technique that uses convex interpolations of input data and their labels to enhance model generalization during training. However, the application of MixUp to the natural language understanding (NLU) domain has been limited, due to the difficulty of interpolating text directly in the input space. In this study, we propose MixUp methods at the Input, Manifold, and sentence embedding levels for the transformer architecture, and apply them to finetune the BERT model for a diverse set of NLU tasks. We find that MixUp can improve model performance, as we…
Los Alamos National Laboratory（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Mixup~\cite{zhang2017mixup} is a recently proposed method for training deep neural networks where additional samples are generated during training by convexly combining random pairs of images and their associated labels. While simple to implement, it has been shown to be a surprisingly effective method of data augmentation for image classification: DNNs trained with mixup show noticeable gains in classification performance on a number of image classification benchmarks. In this work, we discuss a hitherto untouched aspect of mixup training -- the calibration and predictive uncertainty of model…
PRHLT Research Center, Universitat Politècnica de València（PRHLT研究中心，瓦伦西亚理工大学）；AUDIAS - Audio, Data Intelligence and Speech, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid（AUDIAS - 音频、数据智能与语音，马德里自治大学）
Deep Neural Networks (DNN) represent the state of the art in many tasks. However, due to their overparameterization, their generalization capabilities are in doubt and still a field under study. Consequently, DNN can overfit and assign overconfident predictions -- effects that have been shown to affect the calibration of the confidences assigned to unseen data. Data Augmentation (DA) strategies have been proposed to regularize these models, being Mixup one of the most popular due to its ability to improve the accuracy, the uncertainty quantification and the calibration of DNN. In this work how…
Improving Mixup Calibration with Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Optimization
Department of Mathematics & Statistics（数学与统计学系）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Division of Systems Engineering（电气与计算机工程系，系统工程 division）；Department of Biomedical Engineering（生物医学工程系）；Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences（计算与数据科学学院）
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；AITRICS
Graph-structured datasets usually have irregular graph sizes and connectivities, rendering the use of recent data augmentation techniques, such as Mixup, difficult. To tackle this challenge, we present the first Mixup-like graph augmentation method at the graph-level called Graph Transplant, which mixes irregular graphs in data space. To be well defined on various scales of the graph, our method identifies the sub-structure as a mix unit that can preserve the local information. Since the mixup-based methods without special consideration of the context are prone to generate noisy samples, our m…
Mixup is a data-dependent regularization technique that consists in linearly interpolating input samples and associated outputs. It has been shown to improve accuracy when used to train on standard machine learning datasets. However, authors have pointed out that Mixup can produce out-of-distribution virtual samples and even contradictions in the augmented training set, potentially resulting in adversarial effects. In this paper, we introduce Local Mixup in which distant input samples are weighted down when computing the loss. In constrained settings we demonstrate that Local Mixup can create …
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）
Mixup is a data augmentation method that generates new data points by mixing a pair of input data. While mixup generally improves the prediction performance, it sometimes degrades the performance. In this paper, we first identify the main causes of this phenomenon by theoretically and empirically analyzing the mixup algorithm. To resolve this, we propose GenLabel, a simple yet effective relabeling algorithm designed for mixup. In particular, GenLabel helps the mixup algorithm correctly label mixup samples by learning the class-conditional data distribution using generative models. Via extensiv…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Neural Processing Research Center（神经处理研究中心）
While deep neural networks show great performance on fitting to the training distribution, improving the networks' generalization performance to the test distribution and robustness to the sensitivity to input perturbations still remain as a challenge. Although a number of mixup based augmentation strategies have been proposed to partially address them, it remains unclear as to how to best utilize the supervisory signal within each input data for mixup from the optimization perspective. We propose a new perspective on batch mixup and formulate the optimal construction of a batch of mixup data …
Korea University（高丽大学）；Meta Reality Labs（Meta现实实验室）
Data augmentation is key to improving the generalization ability of deep learning models. Mixup is a simple and widely-used data augmentation technique that has proven effective in alleviating the problems of overfitting and data scarcity. Also, recent studies of saliency-aware Mixup in the image domain show that preserving discriminative parts is beneficial to improving the generalization performance. However, these Mixup-based data augmentations are underexplored in 3D vision, especially in point clouds. In this paper, we propose SageMix, a saliency-guided Mixup for point clouds to preserve …
University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）；National Research Council Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）
Mixup, which creates synthetic training instances by linearly interpolating random sample pairs, is a simple and yet effective regularization technique to boost the performance of deep models trained with SGD. In this work, we report a previously unobserved phenomenon in Mixup training: on a number of standard datasets, the performance of Mixup-trained models starts to decay after training for a large number of epochs, giving rise to a U-shaped generalization curve. This behavior is further aggravated when the size of original dataset is reduced. To help understand such a behavior of Mixup, we…
Machine learning techniques are used in a wide range of domains. However, machine learning models often suffer from the problem of over-fitting. Many data augmentation methods have been proposed to tackle such a problem, and one of them is called mixup. Mixup is a recently proposed regularization procedure, which linearly interpolates a random pair of training examples. This regularization method works very well experimentally, but its theoretical guarantee is not adequately discussed. In this study, we aim to discover why mixup works well from the aspect of the statistical learning theory.
Improving the generalization of deep networks is an important open challenge, particularly in domains without plentiful data. The mixup algorithm improves generalization by linearly interpolating a pair of examples and their corresponding labels. These interpolated examples augment the original training set. Mixup has shown promising results in various classification tasks, but systematic analysis of mixup in regression remains underexplored. Using mixup directly on regression labels can result in arbitrarily incorrect labels. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful algorithm, C-Mixup,…
This paper proposes a novel formulation of prototypical loss with mixup for speaker verification. Mixup is a simple yet efficient data augmentation technique that fabricates a weighted combination of random data point and label pairs for deep neural network training. Mixup has attracted increasing attention due to its ability to improve robustness and generalization of deep neural networks. Although mixup has shown success in diverse domains, most applications have centered around closed-set classification tasks. In this work, we propose contrastive-mixup, a novel augmentation strategy that le…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Meta AI；Five AI Ltd.（Five AI有限公司）
We show that the effectiveness of the well celebrated Mixup [Zhang et al., 2018] can be further improved if instead of using it as the sole learning objective, it is utilized as an additional regularizer to the standard cross-entropy loss. This simple change not only provides much improved accuracy but also significantly improves the quality of the predictive uncertainty estimation of Mixup in most cases under various forms of covariate shifts and out-of-distribution detection experiments. In fact, we observe that Mixup yields much degraded performance on detecting out-of-distribution samples …
MaLGa - University of Genova, Italy（马尔加-热那亚大学，意大利）；Google Research - Brain team, Accra（谷歌研究-大脑团队，阿克拉）；Google Research - Brain team, Berlin（谷歌研究-大脑团队，柏林）；Google Research - Brain team, Paris（谷歌研究-大脑团队，巴黎）
Mixup is a popular data augmentation technique based on taking convex combinations of pairs of examples and their labels. This simple technique has been shown to substantially improve both the robustness and the generalization of the trained model. However, it is not well-understood why such improvement occurs. In this paper, we provide theoretical analysis to demonstrate how using Mixup in training helps model robustness and generalization. For robustness, we show that minimizing the Mixup loss corresponds to approximately minimizing an upper bound of the adversarial loss. This explains why m…
NORCE Norwegian Research Centre AS（NORCE挪威研究中心）；University of Stavanger（斯塔万格大学）
Generalizing the application of machine learning models to situations where the statistical distribution of training and test data are different has been a complex problem. Our contributions in this paper are threefold: (1) we introduce an anchored-based Out of Distribution (OOD) Regression Mixup algorithm, leveraging manifold hidden state mixup and observation similarities to form a novel regularization penalty, (2) we provide a first of its kind, high resolution Distributed Acoustic Sensor (DAS) dataset that is suitable for testing OOD regression modelling, allowing other researchers to benc…
The Mixup method (Zhang et al. 2018), which uses linearly interpolated data, has emerged as an effective data augmentation tool to improve generalization performance and the robustness to adversarial examples. The motivation is to curtail undesirable oscillations by its implicit model constraint to behave linearly at in-between observed data points and promote smoothness. In this work, we formally investigate this premise, propose a way to explicitly impose smoothness constraints, and extend it to incorporate with implicit model constraints. First, we derive a new function class composed of ke…
We develop a novel data-driven nonlinear mixup mechanism for graph data augmentation and present different mixup functions for sample pairs and their labels. Mixup is a data augmentation method to create new training data by linearly interpolating between pairs of data samples and their labels. Mixup of graph data is challenging since the interpolation between graphs of potentially different sizes is an ill-posed operation. Hence, a promising approach for graph mixup is to first project the graphs onto a common latent feature space and then explore linear and nonlinear mixup strategies in this…
Unsupervised domain adaptation studies the problem of utilizing a relevant source domain with abundant labels to build predictive modeling for an unannotated target domain. Recent work observe that the popular adversarial approach of learning domain-invariant features is insufficient to achieve desirable target domain performance and thus introduce additional training constraints, e.g. cluster assumption. However, these approaches impose the constraints on source and target domains individually, ignoring the important interplay between them. In this work, we propose to enforce training constra…
Towards Optimization and Model Selection for Domain Generalization: A Mixup-guided Solution
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；National Engineering Research Center for Software Engineering, Peking University（北京大学软件工程国家工程研究中心）
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Lehigh University（理海大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Salesforce Research（赛富时研究院）；Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）
Mixup is the latest data augmentation technique that linearly interpolates input examples and the corresponding labels. It has shown strong effectiveness in image classification by interpolating images at the pixel level. Inspired by this line of research, in this paper, we explore i) how to apply mixup to natural language processing tasks since text data can hardly be mixed in the raw format; ii) if mixup is still effective in transformer-based learning models, e.g., BERT. To achieve the goal, we incorporate mixup to transformer-based pre-trained architecture, named "mixup-transformer", for a…
Texas A&M University（德州农工大学）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Rice University（莱斯大学）
This work develops \emph{mixup for graph data}. Mixup has shown superiority in improving the generalization and robustness of neural networks by interpolating features and labels between two random samples. Traditionally, Mixup can work on regular, grid-like, and Euclidean data such as image or tabular data. However, it is challenging to directly adopt Mixup to augment graph data because different graphs typically: 1) have different numbers of nodes; 2) are not readily aligned; and 3) have unique typologies in non-Euclidean space. To this end, we propose $\mathcal{G}$-Mixup to augment graphs f…
While novel computer vision architectures are gaining traction, the impact of model architectures is often related to changes or exploring in training methods. Identity mapping-based architectures ResNets and DenseNets have promised path-breaking results in the image classification task and are go-to methods for even now if the data given is fairly limited. Considering the ease of training with limited resources this work revisits the ResNets and improves the ResNet50 \cite{resnets} by using mixup data-augmentation as regularization and tuning the hyper-parameters.
The success of deep learning relies on the availability of large-scale annotated data sets, the acquisition of which can be costly, requiring expert domain knowledge. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) mitigates this challenge by exploiting the behavior of the neural function on large unlabeled data. The smoothness of the neural function is a commonly used assumption exploited in SSL. A successful example is the adoption of mixup strategy in SSL that enforces the global smoothness of the neural function by encouraging it to behave linearly when interpolating between training examples. Despite its …
Deep learning-based pronunciation scoring models highly rely on the availability of the annotated non-native data, which is costly and has scalability issues. To deal with the data scarcity problem, data augmentation is commonly used for model pretraining. In this paper, we propose a phone-level mixup, a simple yet effective data augmentation method, to improve the performance of word-level pronunciation scoring. Specifically, given a phoneme sequence from lexicon, the artificial augmented word sample can be generated by randomly sampling from the corresponding phone-level features in training…
Mixup is a procedure for data augmentation that trains networks to make smoothly interpolated predictions between datapoints. Adversarial training is a strong form of data augmentation that optimizes for worst-case predictions in a compact space around each data-point, resulting in neural networks that make much more robust predictions. In this paper, we bring these ideas together by adversarially probing the space between datapoints, using projected gradient descent (PGD). The fundamental approach in this work is to leverage backpropagation through the mixup interpolation during training to o…
Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies（圣安娜高等研究院）
In this paper we propose $ε$-Consistent Mixup ($ε$mu). $ε$mu is a data-based structural regularization technique that combines Mixup's linear interpolation with consistency regularization in the Mixup direction, by compelling a simple adaptive tradeoff between the two. This learnable combination of consistency and interpolation induces a more flexible structure on the evolution of the response across the feature space and is shown to improve semi-supervised classification accuracy on the SVHN and CIFAR10 benchmark datasets, yielding the largest gains in the most challenging low label-availabil…
National Tsing-Hua University（国立清华大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Deep image classifiers often perform poorly when training data are heavily class-imbalanced. In this work, we propose a new regularization technique, Remix, that relaxes Mixup's formulation and enables the mixing factors of features and labels to be disentangled. Specifically, when mixing two samples, while features are mixed in the same fashion as Mixup, Remix assigns the label in favor of the minority class by providing a disproportionately higher weight to the minority class. By doing so, the classifier learns to push the decision boundaries towards the majority classes and balance the gene…
Nordita, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（北欧理论物理研究所，KTH皇家理工学院）；Stockholm University（斯德哥尔摩大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；ICSI（国际计算机科学研究所）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Lawrence Livermore National Labs（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）；IBM Research AI（IBM研究院人工智能部门）
The hypothesis that sub-network initializations (lottery) exist within the initializations of over-parameterized networks, which when trained in isolation produce highly generalizable models, has led to crucial insights into network initialization and has enabled efficient inferencing. Supervised models with uncalibrated confidences tend to be overconfident even when making wrong prediction. In this paper, for the first time, we study how explicit confidence calibration in the over-parameterized network impacts the quality of the resulting lottery tickets. More specifically, we incorporate a s…
National Research Council Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）；University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
MixUp is a recently proposed data-augmentation scheme, which linearly interpolates a random pair of training examples and correspondingly the one-hot representations of their labels. Training deep neural networks with such additional data is shown capable of significantly improving the predictive accuracy of the current art. The power of MixUp, however, is primarily established empirically and its working and effectiveness have not been explained in any depth. In this paper, we develop an understanding for MixUp as a form of "out-of-manifold regularization", which imposes certain "local linear…
We propose the first unified theoretical analysis of mixed sample data augmentation (MSDA), such as Mixup and CutMix. Our theoretical results show that regardless of the choice of the mixing strategy, MSDA behaves as a pixel-level regularization of the underlying training loss and a regularization of the first layer parameters. Similarly, our theoretical results support that the MSDA training strategy can improve adversarial robustness and generalization compared to the vanilla training strategy. Using the theoretical results, we provide a high-level understanding of how different design choic…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；Samsung AI Centre Toronto（三星多伦多人工智能中心）；Borealis AI（Borealis人工智能公司）；York University（约克大学）
Data augmentation is a key element for training accurate models by reducing overfitting and improving generalization. For image classification, the most popular data augmentation techniques range from simple photometric and geometrical transformations, to more complex methods that use visual saliency to craft new training examples. As augmentation methods get more complex, their ability to increase the test accuracy improves, yet, such methods become cumbersome, inefficient and lead to poor out-of-domain generalization, as we show in this paper. This motivates a new augmentation technique that…
Rethinking Data Distillation: Do Not Overlook Calibration
Texas A&M University（德州农工大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Certik；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）
