# SynerMix: Synergistic Mixup Solution for Enhanced Intra-Class Cohesion and Inter-Class Separability in Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14137 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14137/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (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)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [Tutorial on Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05908/) (2016)
- [Puzzle Mix: Exploiting Saliency and Local Statistics for Optimal Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06962/) (2020)
- [MixUp as Locally Linear Out-Of-Manifold Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02499/) (2018)
- [SaliencyMix: A Saliency Guided Data Augmentation Strategy for Better Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01791/) (2020)
- [G-Mixup: Graph Data Augmentation for Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07179/) (2022)
- [Augmenting Data with Mixup for Sentence Classification: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08941/) (2019)
- [Dataset Augmentation in Feature Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05538/) (2017)
- [C-Mixup: Improving Generalization in Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05775/) (2022)
- [Achieving Domain Generalization in Underwater Object Detection by Domain Mixup and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02230/) (2021)
- [FIXED: Frustratingly Easy Domain Generalization with Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05228/) (2022)
- [Asymptotic Midpoint Mixup for Margin Balancing and Moderate Broadening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14696/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To address the issues of MixUp and its variants (e.g., Manifold MixUp) in image classification tasks-namely, their neglect of mixing within the same class (intra-class mixup) and their inadequacy in enhancing intra-class cohesion through their mixing operations-we propose a novel mixup method named SynerMix-Intra and, building upon this, introduce a synergistic mixup solution named SynerMix. SynerMix-Intra specifically targets intra-class mixup to bolster intra-class cohesion, a feature not addressed by current mixup methods. For each mini-batch, it leverages feature representations of unaugmented original images from each class to generate a synthesized feature representation through random linear interpolation. All synthesized representations are then fed into the classification and loss layers to calculate an average classification loss that significantly enhances intra-class cohesion. Furthermore, SynerMix combines SynerMix-Intra with an existing mixup approach (e.g., MixUp, Manifold MixUp), which primarily focuses on inter-class mixup and has the benefit of enhancing inter-class separability. In doing so, it integrates both inter- and intra-class mixup in a balanced way while concurrently improving intra-class cohesion and inter-class separability. Experimental results on six datasets show that SynerMix achieves a 0.1% to 3.43% higher accuracy than the best of either MixUp or SynerMix-Intra alone, averaging a 1.16% gain. It also surpasses the top-performer of either Manifold MixUp or SynerMix-Intra by 0.12% to 5.16%, with an average gain of 1.11%. Given that SynerMix is model-agnostic, it holds significant potential for application in other domains where mixup methods have shown promise, such as speech and text classification. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/wxitxy/synermix.git.