Embedding Space Interpolation Beyond Mini-Batch, Beyond Pairs and Beyond
  Examples
Shashanka Venkataramanan Ewa Kijak Laurent Amsaleg Yannis Avrithis
Mixup refers to interpolation-based data augmentation, originally motivated
as a way to go beyond empirical risk minimization (ERM). Its extensions mostly
focus on the definition of interpolation and the space (input or feature) where
it takes place, while the augmentation process itself is less studied. In most
methods, the number of generated examples is limited to the mini-batch size and
the number of examples being interpolated is limited to two (pairs), in the
input space.
  We make progress in this direction by introducing MultiMix, which generates
an arbitrarily large number of interpolated examples beyond the mini-batch size
and interpolates the entire mini-batch in the embedding space. Effectively, we
sample on the entire convex hull of the mini-batch rather than along linear
segments between pairs of examples.
  On sequence data, we further extend to Dense MultiMix. We densely interpolate
features and target labels at each spatial location and also apply the loss
densely. To mitigate the lack of dense labels, we inherit labels from examples
and weight interpolation factors by attention as a measure of confidence.
  Overall, we increase the number of loss terms per mini-batch by orders of
magnitude at little additional cost. This is only possible because of
interpolating in the embedding space. We empirically show that our solutions
yield significant improvement over state-of-the-art mixup methods on four
different benchmarks, despite interpolation being only linear. By analyzing the
embedding space, we show that the classes are more tightly clustered and
uniformly spread over the embedding space, thereby explaining the improved
behavior.