Improving Auto-Augment via Augmentation-Wise Weight Sharing

The recent progress on automatically searching augmentation policies has boosted the performance substantially for various tasks. A key component of automatic augmentation search is the evaluation process for a particular augmentation policy, which is utilized to return reward and usually runs thousands of times. A plain evaluation process, which includes full model training and validation, would be time-consuming. To achieve efficiency, many choose to sacrifice evaluation reliability for speed. In this paper, we dive into the dynamics of augmented training of the model. This inspires us to design a powerful and efficient proxy task based on the Augmentation-Wise Weight Sharing (AWS) to form a fast yet accurate evaluation process in an elegant way.