Deep neural networks are capable of learning powerful representations to tackle complex vision tasks but expose undesirable properties like the over-fitting issue. To this end, regularization techniques like image augmentation are necessary for deep neural networks to generalize well. Nevertheless, most prevalent image augmentation recipes confine themselves to off-the-shelf linear transformations like scale, flip, and colorjitter. Due to their hand-crafted property, these augmentations are insufficient to generate truly hard augmented examples. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective of augmentation to regularize the training process. Inspired by the recent success of applying masked image modeling to self-supervised learning, we adopt the self-supervised masked autoencoder to generate the distorted view of the input images. We show that utilizing such model-based nonlinear transformation as data augmentation can improve high-level recognition tasks. We term the proposed method as \textbf{M}ask-\textbf{R}econstruct \textbf{A}ugmentation (MRA). The extensive experiments on various image classification benchmarks verify the effectiveness of the proposed augmentation. Specifically, MRA consistently enhances the performance on supervised, semi-supervised as well as few-shot classification. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/haohang96/MRA}.
View on arXiv@article{xu2025_2206.04846,
title={ Masked Autoencoders are Robust Data Augmentors },
author={ Haohang Xu and Shuangrui Ding and Manqi Zhao and Dongsheng Jiang },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.04846},
year={ 2025 }
}