Recent work on automated data augmentation strategies has led to state-of-the-art results in image classification and object detection. An obstacle to a large-scale adoption of these methods is that they require a separate and expensive search phase. A common way to overcome the expense of the search phase was to use a smaller proxy task. However, it was not clear if the optimized hyperparameters found on the proxy task are also optimal for the actual task. In this work, we rethink the process of designing automated data augmentation strategies. We find that while previous work required searching for many augmentation parameters (e.g.

Recent work on automated data augmentation strategies has led to state-of-the-art results in image classification and object detection. An obstacle to a large-scale adoption of these methods is that they require a separate and expensive search phase. A common way to overcome the expense of the search phase was to use a smaller proxy task. However, it was not clear if the optimized hyperparameters found on the proxy task are also optimal for the actual task. In this work, we rethink the process of designing automated data augmentation strategies.

Weaknesses: The paper only shows proxy task complicated search space may not work as well as using a simple search task without much approximation. It doesn't really tell us what happens if a complicated search space can be efficiently explored on the real task. In this sense, this paper is only a reflection of current practice, without providing a clear direction forward. In fact, the simplification of this paper (reducing the search space to number of op to apply, and the shared magnitude of ops) seems like an over-kill. By doing that, it misses an opportunity to answer some interesting question, such as: "Does assigning a different magnitude to different ops useful at all in auto data augmentation"?

This paper got mixed reviews. The original ratings are 6,5,5,6. On the positive side, reviewers think the paper solves an important problem. Data augmentation is recognized to be an important step for improving machine learning model performance. However, existing auto data augmentation methods are typically very costly.

Recent work on automated data augmentation strategies has led to state-of-the-art results in image classification and object detection. An obstacle to a large-scale adoption of these methods is that they require a separate and expensive search phase. A common way to overcome the expense of the search phase was to use a smaller proxy task. However, it was not clear if the optimized hyperparameters found on the proxy task are also optimal for the actual task. In this work, we rethink the process of designing automated data augmentation strategies.