# You Only Cut Once: Boosting Data Augmentation with a Single Cut

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12078 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12078/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09382/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [DiffuseMix: Label-Preserving Data Augmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14881/) (2024)
- [Prompt-In-Prompt Learning for Universal Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05038/) (2023)
- [Image Data Augmentation Approaches: A Comprehensive Survey and Future directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02830/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Mixup Augmentations and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05202/) (2024)
- [GenMix: Effective Data Augmentation with Generative Diffusion Model Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02366/) (2024)
- [PointCaM: Cut-and-Mix for Open-Set Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02011/) (2022)
- [Context-guided Responsible Data Augmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10687/) (2025)
- [CropMix: Sampling a Rich Input Distribution via Multi-Scale Cropping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15955/) (2022)
- [What Images are More Memorable to Machines?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07625/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Sample Utilization through Sample Adaptive Augmentation in Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03598/) (2023)
- [Towards Understanding How Self-training Tolerates Data Backdoor Poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08751/) (2023)
- [SASSL: Enhancing Self-Supervised Learning via Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01187/) (2023)
- [NBBOX: Noisy Bounding Box Improves Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09424/) (2024)
- [DualAug: Exploiting Additional Heavy Augmentation with OOD Data Rejection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08139/) (2023)
- [You Only Need Half: Boosting Data Augmentation by Using Partial Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02830/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Feature Learning and Matching for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08533/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Ambiguous Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with Soft Label-based Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20867/) (2025)
- [Handwritten Text Recognition of Historical Manuscripts Using Transformer-Based Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11499/) (2025)
- [InstructMixup: Instruction-Guided Salient Patch Editing for Robust Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19324/) (2026)
- [Boosting Semi-Supervised 2D Human Pose Estimation by Revisiting Data Augmentation and Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11566/) (2024)
- [HACMatch Semi-Supervised Rotation Regression with Hardness-Aware Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21583/) (2026)
- [AGVBench: A Reliability-Oriented Benchmark of Data Augmentation for Vein Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02271/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present You Only Cut Once (YOCO) for performing data augmentations. YOCO cuts one image into two pieces and performs data augmentations individually within each piece. Applying YOCO improves the diversity of the augmentation per sample and encourages neural networks to recognize objects from partial information. YOCO enjoys the properties of parameter-free, easy usage, and boosting almost all augmentations for free. Thorough experiments are conducted to evaluate its effectiveness. We first demonstrate that YOCO can be seamlessly applied to varying data augmentations, neural network architectures, and brings performance gains on CIFAR and ImageNet classification tasks, sometimes surpassing conventional image-level augmentation by large margins. Moreover, we show YOCO benefits contrastive pre-training toward a more powerful representation that can be better transferred to multiple downstream tasks. Finally, we study a number of variants of YOCO and empirically analyze the performance for respective settings. Code is available at GitHub.