# Revisiting Data Augmentation in Model Compression: An Empirical and Comprehensive Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13232 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13232/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 82 of its 104 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09501/) (2018)
- [Channel Pruning for Accelerating Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06168/) (2017)
- [Distillation as a Defense to Adversarial Perturbations against Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04508/) (2015)
- [Rethinking the Value of Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05270/) (2018)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Learning Sparse Neural Networks through L0 Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01312/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The excellent performance of deep neural networks is usually accompanied by a large number of parameters and computations, which have limited their usage on the resource-limited edge devices. To address this issue, abundant methods such as pruning, quantization and knowledge distillation have been proposed to compress neural networks and achieved significant breakthroughs. However, most of these compression methods focus on the architecture or the training method of neural networks but ignore the influence from data augmentation. In this paper, we revisit the usage of data augmentation in model compression and give a comprehensive study on the relation between model sizes and their optimal data augmentation policy. To sum up, we mainly have the following three observations: (A) Models in different sizes prefer data augmentation with different magnitudes. Hence, in iterative pruning, data augmentation with varying magnitudes leads to better performance than data augmentation with a consistent magnitude. (B) Data augmentation with a high magnitude may significantly improve the performance of large models but harm the performance of small models. Fortunately, small models can still benefit from strong data augmentations by firstly learning them with "additional parameters" and then discard these "additional parameters" during inference. (C) The prediction of a pre-trained large model can be utilized to measure the difficulty of data augmentation. Thus it can be utilized as a criterion to design better data augmentation policies. We hope this paper may promote more research on the usage of data augmentation in model compression.