ParticleAugment: Sampling-Based Data Augmentation

We present an automated data augmentation approach for image classification. We formulate the problem as Monte Carlo sampling where our goal is to approximate the optimal augmentation policies. We propose a particle filtering scheme for the policy search where the probability of applying a set of augmentation operations forms the state of the filter. We measure the policy performance based on the loss function difference between a reference and the actual model, which we afterwards use to re-weight the particles and finally update the policy. In our experiments, we show that our formulation for automated augmentation reaches promising results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets using the standard network architectures for this problem. By comparing with the related work, our method reaches a balance between the computational cost of policy search and the model performance. Our code will be made publicly available.