AdvMask: A sparse adversarial attack-based data augmentation method for image classification

Data augmentation has been an essential technique for improving the generalization ability of deep neural networks in image classification tasks. However, intensive changes in appearance and different degrees of occlusion in images are the key factors that severely affect the generalization ability of image classification models. Therefore, in order to enhance the generalization performance and robustness of deep models, data augmentation approaches by providing models with more diverse training data in various scenarios are widely applied. Although many existing data augmentation methods simulate occlusion in the augmented images to enhance the generalization of models, these methods randomly delete some areas in images without considering the semantic information of images. In this work, we propose a novel data augmentation method named AdvMask for image classification based on sparse adversarial attack techniques. AdvMask first identifies the key points that have the greatest influence on the classification results via a proposed end-to-end sparse adversarial attack module. During the data augmentation process, AdvMask efficiently generates diverse augmented data with structured occlusions based on the key points. By doing so, AdvMask can force deep models to seek other relevant content while the most discriminative content is hidden. Extensive experimental results on various benchmark datasets and deep models demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively improve the generalization performance of deep models and significantly outperforms previous data augmentation methods. Code for reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/Jackbrocp/AdvMask.