Papers › RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space

RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space

30 Sep 2019NeurIPS 2020 12arXiv:1909.13719archive 2025-07-28

Ekin D. Cubuk, Barret Zoph, Jonathon Shlens, Quoc V. Le

Recent work has shown that data augmentation has the potential to significantly improve the generalization of deep learning models. Recently, automated augmentation strategies have led to state-of-the-art results in image classification and object detection. While these strategies were optimized for improving validation accuracy, they also led to state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised learning and improved robustness to common corruptions of images. An obstacle to a large-scale adoption of these methods is a separate search phase which increases the training complexity and may substantially increase the computational cost. Additionally, due to the separate search phase, these approaches are unable to adjust the regularization strength based on model or dataset size. Automated augmentation policies are often found by training small models on small datasets and subsequently applied to train larger models. In this work, we remove both of these obstacles. RandAugment has a significantly reduced search space which allows it to be trained on the target task with no need for a separate proxy task. Furthermore, due to the parameterization, the regularization strength may be tailored to different model and dataset sizes. RandAugment can be used uniformly across different tasks and datasets and works out of the box, matching or surpassing all previous automated augmentation approaches on CIFAR-10/100, SVHN, and ImageNet. On the ImageNet dataset we achieve 85.0% accuracy, a 0.6% increase over the previous state-of-the-art and 1.0% increase over baseline augmentation. On object detection, RandAugment leads to 1.0-1.3% improvement over baseline augmentation, and is within 0.3% mAP of AutoAugment on COCO. Finally, due to its interpretable hyperparameter, RandAugment may be used to investigate the role of data augmentation with varying model and dataset size. Code is available online.

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Code

Syntology Ran 58 of 65 code samples harvested from 6 repositories linked to this paper; 7 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · violated contract; 17 ran · our draft was wrong; 22 ran · fixture could not drive it; 18 ran with no contract checked.

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A-Telfer/AugKey mentioned on GitHub report
adam-mehdi/MuarAugment mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
chenyang4/resmooth mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
hitchingsh/ml-examples mentioned on GitHubtf report
ildoonet/pytorch-randaugment mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
lyxxn0414/test-data-generation mentioned on GitHubtf report
nachiket273/pytorch_resnet_rs mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
open-mmlab/mmpretrain mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
rlagywns0213/cifar100_data_augmentation mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
rwightman/pytorch-image-models mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
sailist/thexp-implement mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
tensorflow/tpu mentioned on GitHubtf report
zhanghang1989/fast-autoaug-torch mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
pwc-1/Paper-9 mindspore report

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Code Syntology ran Syntology

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1ran · violated contract
17ran · our draft was wrong
22ran · fixture could not drive it
18ran
7unverified

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Tasks

Data AugmentationDomain GeneralizationImage ClassificationObject Detectionimage-classificationobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Data Augmentation ImageNet ResNet-50 (RA) Accuracy (%) 77.6 #14 of 17 Archive leaderboard report
Domain Generalization VizWiz-Classification EfficientNet-B7 (randaug) Accuracy - All Images 45 #17 of 90 Archive leaderboard report
Domain Generalization VizWiz-Classification EfficientNet-B7 (randaug) Accuracy - Clean Images 48.7 #17 of 90 Archive leaderboard report
Domain Generalization VizWiz-Classification EfficientNet-B7 (randaug) Accuracy - Corrupted Images 38.9 #17 of 90 Archive leaderboard report
Domain Generalization VizWiz-Classification EfficientNet-B5 (randaug) Accuracy - All Images 42.1 #25 of 90 Archive leaderboard report
Domain Generalization VizWiz-Classification EfficientNet-B5 (randaug) Accuracy - Clean Images 47.3 #25 of 90 Archive leaderboard report
Domain Generalization VizWiz-Classification EfficientNet-B5 (randaug) Accuracy - Corrupted Images 35.5 #25 of 90 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet EfficientNet-B8 (RandAugment) Top 1 Accuracy 85.4% #227 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet EfficientNet-B7 (RandAugment) Number of params 66M #269 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet EfficientNet-B7 (RandAugment) Top 1 Accuracy 85% #269 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

1x1 ConvolutionAutoAugmentAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationBottleneck Residual BlockColorJitterConvolutionCosine AnnealingCutoutDense ConnectionsDepthwise ConvolutionDepthwise Separable ConvolutionDropoutEfficientNetFPNFocal LossGlobal Average PoolingInverted Residual BlockKaiming InitializationLSTMMax PoolingPointwise ConvolutionRMSPropRandAugmentRandom Horizontal FlipRandom Resized CropReLUResidual BlockResidual ConnectionRetinaNetSGD with MomentumShakeDropSigmoid ActivationSqueeze-and-Excitation BlockTanh ActivationWeight DecayWide Residual BlockWideResNet

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