A key challenge in leveraging data augmentation for neural network training is choosing an effective augmentation policy from a large search space of candidate operations. Properly chosen augmentation policies can lead to significant generalization improvements; however, state-of-the-art approaches such as AutoAugment are computationally infeasible to run for the ordinary user. In this paper, we introduce a new data augmentation algorithm, Population Based Augmentation (PBA), which generates nonstationary augmentation policy schedules instead of a fixed augmentation policy. We show that PBA can match the performance of AutoAugment on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN, with three orders of magnitude less overall compute. On CIFAR-10 we achieve a mean test error of 1.46%, which is a slight improvement upon the current state-of-the-art. The code for PBA is open source and is available at https://github.com/arcelien/pba.

本文提出一种新的数据增强算法——Population Based Augmentation(PBA)——来生成非静态的增强策略日程表，相比于目前最先进的方法AutoAugment，PBA在 CIFAR-10、CIFAR-100 和 SVHN 数据集上耗费的总计算资源少三个数量级，但性能相当。在CIFAR-10数据集上，我们实现了1.46%的平均测试误差，稍微优于当前的最先进水平。

基于种群的数据扩充：高效学习数据扩充策略