Data augmentation is a key element for training accurate models by reducing overfitting and improving generalization. For image classification, the most popular data augmentation techniques range from simple photometric and geometrical transformations, to more complex methods that use visual saliency to craft new training examples. As augmentation methods get more complex, their ability to increase the test accuracy improves, yet, such methods become cumbersome, inefficient and lead to poor out-of-domain generalization, as we show in this paper. This motivates a new augmentation technique that allows for high accuracy gains while being simple, efficient (i.e., minimal computation overhead) and generalizable. To this end, we introduce Saliency-Guided Mixup with Optimal Rearrangements (SAGE), which creates new training examples by rearranging and mixing image pairs using visual saliency as guidance. By explicitly leveraging saliency, SAGE promotes discriminative foreground objects and produces informative new images useful for training. We demonstrate on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 that SAGE achieves better or comparable performance to the state of the art while being more efficient. Additionally, evaluations in the out-of-distribution setting, and few-shot learning on mini-ImageNet, show that SAGE achieves improved generalization performance without trading off robustness.

While deep neural networks achieve great performance on fitting the training distribution, the learned networks are prone to overfitting and are susceptible to adversarial attacks. In this regard, a number of mixup based augmentation methods have been recently proposed. However, these approaches mainly focus on creating previously unseen virtual examples and can sometimes provide misleading supervisory signal to the network. To this end, we propose Puzzle Mix, a mixup method for explicitly utilizing the saliency information and the underlying statistics of the natural examples. This leads to an interesting optimization problem alternating between the multi-label objective for optimal mixing mask and saliency discounted optimal transport objective. Our experiments show Puzzle Mix achieves the state of the art generalization and the adversarial robustness results compared to other mixup methods on CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/snu-mllab/PuzzleMix.