AlignMixup: Improving Representations By Interpolating Aligned Features

Mixup is a powerful data augmentation method that interpolates between two or more examples in the input or feature space and between the corresponding target labels. However, how to best interpolate images is not well defined. Recent mixup methods overlay or cut-and-paste two or more objects into one image, which needs care in selecting regions. In this work, we revisit mixup from the deformation perspective and introduce AlignMixup, where we geometrically align two images in the feature space. The correspondences allow us to interpolate between two sets of features, while keeping the locations of one set. Interestingly, this retains mostly the geometry or pose of one image and the appearance or texture of the other. AlignMixup outperforms state-of-the-art mixup methods on five different benchmarks.