Towards Resisting Large Data Variations via Introspective Learning
Authors: Yunhan Zhao, Ye Tian, Wei Shen, Alan Yuille
Keywords: Introspective learning, Large variations resistance, Image classification, Generative models
TL;DR: We propose a principled approach that endows classifiers with the ability to resist larger variations between training and testing data in an intelligent and efficient manner.
Abstract: Learning deep networks which can resist large variations between training andtesting data is essential to build accurate and robust image classifiers.  Towardsthis end, a typical strategy is to apply data augmentation to enlarge the trainingset.   However,  standard  data  augmentation  is  essentially  a  brute-force  strategywhich is inefficient,  as it performs all the pre-defined transformations  to everytraining sample. In this paper, we propose a principled approach to train networkswith  significantly  improved  resistance  to  large  variations  between  training  andtesting data.  This is achieved by embedding a learnable transformation moduleinto the introspective networks (Jin et al., 2017; Lazarow et al., 2017; Lee et al.,2018), which is a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier empowered withgenerative capabilities.  Our approach alternatively synthesizes pseudo-negativesamples with learned transformations and enhances the classifier by retraining itwith synthesized samples.  Experimental results verify that our approach signif-icantly improves the ability of deep networks to resist large variations betweentraining and testing data and achieves classification accuracy improvements onseveral benchmark datasets, including MNIST, affNIST, SVHN and CIFAR-10.