# Fourier Transform Approximation as an Auxiliary Task for Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11478 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11478/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Fast is better than free: Revisiting adversarial training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03994/) (2020)
- [Auxiliary Tasks in Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06334/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Generalisation with Meta Auxiliary Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08933/) (2019)
- [SpectralDefense: Detecting Adversarial Attacks on CNNs in the Fourier Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03000/) (2021)
- [Towards Frequency-Based Explanation for Robust CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03141/) (2020)
- [Augmenting Supervised Neural Networks with Unsupervised Objectives for Large-scale Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06582/) (2016)
- [Regularizing Deep Networks by Modeling and Predicting Label Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02009/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image reconstruction is likely the most predominant auxiliary task for image classification, but we would like to think twice about this convention. In this paper, we investigated "approximating the Fourier Transform of the input image" as a potential alternative, in the hope that it may further boost the performances on the primary task or introduce novel constraints not well covered by image reconstruction. We experimented with five popular classification architectures on the CIFAR-10 dataset, and the empirical results indicated that our proposed auxiliary task generally improves the classification accuracy. More notably, the results showed that in certain cases our proposed auxiliary task may enhance the classifiers' resistance to adversarial attacks generated using the fast gradient sign method.