# MixPro: Data Augmentation with MaskMix and Progressive Attention Labeling for Vision Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.12043 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12043/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (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)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [Intriguing Properties of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10497/) (2021)
- [XCiT: Cross-Covariance Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09681/) (2021)
- [Focal Self-attention for Local-Global Interactions in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00641/) (2021)
- [Puzzle Mix: Exploiting Saliency and Local Statistics for Optimal Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06962/) (2020)
- [You Only Look at One Sequence: Rethinking Transformer in Vision through Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00666/) (2021)
- [SaliencyMix: A Saliency Guided Data Augmentation Strategy for Better Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01791/) (2020)
- [All Tokens Matter: Token Labeling for Training Better Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10858/) (2021)
- [TransMix: Attend to Mix for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09833/) (2021)
- [TokenMix: Rethinking Image Mixing for Data Augmentation in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08409/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [DiffuseMix: Label-Preserving Data Augmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14881/) (2024)
- [LTGC: Long-tail Recognition via Leveraging LLMs-driven Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05854/) (2024)
- [Diff-Tracker: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Unsupervised Trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08394/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Mixup Augmentations and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05202/) (2024)
- [MDCS: More Diverse Experts with Consistency Self-distillation for Long-tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09922/) (2023)
- [Adversarial AutoMixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11954/) (2023)
- [GenMix: Effective Data Augmentation with Generative Diffusion Model Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02366/) (2024)
- [SUMix: Mixup with Semantic and Uncertain Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07805/) (2024)
- [Forte : Finding Outliers with Representation Typicality Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01322/) (2024)
- [MergeMix: A Unified Augmentation Paradigm for Visual and Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23479/) (2025)
- [LABELING COPILOT: A Deep Research Agent for Automated Data Curation in Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22631/) (2025)
- [SelectMix: Enhancing Label Noise Robustness through Targeted Sample Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11265/) (2025)
- [InstructMixup: Instruction-Guided Salient Patch Editing for Robust Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19324/) (2026)
- [Depth-induced Saliency Comparison Network for Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease via Jointly Analysis of Visual Stimuli and Eye Movements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10124/) (2024)
- [Random Token Fusion for Multi-View Medical Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15847/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recently proposed data augmentation TransMix employs attention labels to help visual transformers (ViT) achieve better robustness and performance. However, TransMix is deficient in two aspects: 1) The image cropping method of TransMix may not be suitable for ViTs. 2) At the early stage of training, the model produces unreliable attention maps. TransMix uses unreliable attention maps to compute mixed attention labels that can affect the model. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose MaskMix and Progressive Attention Labeling (PAL) in image and label space, respectively. In detail, from the perspective of image space, we design MaskMix, which mixes two images based on a patch-like grid mask. In particular, the size of each mask patch is adjustable and is a multiple of the image patch size, which ensures each image patch comes from only one image and contains more global contents. From the perspective of label space, we design PAL, which utilizes a progressive factor to dynamically re-weight the attention weights of the mixed attention label. Finally, we combine MaskMix and Progressive Attention Labeling as our new data augmentation method, named MixPro. The experimental results show that our method can improve various ViT-based models at scales on ImageNet classification (73.8% top-1 accuracy based on DeiT-T for 300 epochs). After being pre-trained with MixPro on ImageNet, the ViT-based models also demonstrate better transferability to semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. Furthermore, compared to TransMix, MixPro also shows stronger robustness on several benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/fistyee/MixPro.