# Observations on K-image Expansion of Image-Mixing Augmentation for Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.04248 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04248/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [On Large-Batch Training for Deep Learning: Generalization Gap and Sharp Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04836/) (2016)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09382/) (2016)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [Regularized Evolution for Image Classifier Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01548/) (2018)
- [Deep Bayesian Active Learning with Image Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02910/) (2017)
- [Learning to Reweight Examples for Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09050/) (2018)
- [ProxylessNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search on Target Task and Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00332/) (2018)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [Countering Adversarial Images using Input Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00117/) (2017)
- [FBNet: Hardware-Aware Efficient ConvNet Design via Differentiable Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03443/) (2018)
- [Regularizing Neural Networks by Penalizing Confident Output Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06548/) (2017)
- [Single Path One-Shot Neural Architecture Search with Uniform Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00420/) (2019)
- [Entropy-SGD: Biasing Gradient Descent Into Wide Valleys](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01838/) (2016)
- [Not All Samples Are Created Equal: Deep Learning with Importance Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00942/) (2018)
- [PyHessian: Neural Networks Through the Lens of the Hessian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07145/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Playing the Fool: Jailbreaking LLMs and Multimodal LLMs with Out-of-Distribution Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20823/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Mix-based Data Augmentation: Taxonomy, Methods, Applications, and Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10888/) (2022)
- [A Unified Analysis of Mixed Sample Data Augmentation: A Loss Function Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09913/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Mixup Augmentations and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05202/) (2024)
- [ProxyDet: Synthesizing Proxy Novel Classes via Classwise Mixup for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07266/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image-mixing augmentations (e.g., Mixup and CutMix), which typically involve mixing two images, have become the de-facto training techniques for image classification. Despite their huge success in image classification, the number of images to be mixed has not been elucidated in the literature: only the naive K-image expansion has been shown to lead to performance degradation. This study derives a new K-image mixing augmentation based on the stick-breaking process under Dirichlet prior distribution. We demonstrate the superiority of our K-image expansion augmentation over conventional two-image mixing augmentation methods through extensive experiments and analyses: (1) more robust and generalized classifiers; (2) a more desirable loss landscape shape; (3) better adversarial robustness. Moreover, we show that our probabilistic model can measure the sample-wise uncertainty and boost the efficiency for network architecture search by achieving a 7-fold reduction in the search time. Code will be available at https://github.com/yjyoo3312/DCutMix-PyTorch.git.