Augment Your Batch: Improving Generalization Through Instance Repetition

Elad Hoffer, Tal Ben-Nun, Itay Hubara, Niv Giladi, Torsten Hoefler, Daniel Soudry; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 8129-8138

Large-batch SGD is important for scaling training of deep neural networks. However, without fine-tuning hyperparameter schedules, the generalization of the model may be hampered. We propose to use batch augmentation: replicating instances of samples within the same batch with different data augmentations. Batch augmentation acts as a regularizer and an accelerator, increasing both generalization and performance scaling for a fixed budget of optimization steps. We analyze the effect of batch augmentation on gradient variance and show that it empirically improves convergence for a wide variety of networks and datasets. Our results show that batch augmentation reduces the number of necessary SGD updates to achieve the same accuracy as the state-of-the-art. Overall, this simple yet effective method enables faster training and better generalization by allowing more computational resources to be used concurrently.