Genetic Learning for Designing Sim-to-Real Data Augmentations

ICLR 2024 Workshop DMLR Submission62 Authors

Published: 04 Mar 2024, Last Modified: 02 May 2024DMLR @ ICLR 2024EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Computer Vision, Data Augmentation, Sim-to-Real, Synthetic Data, Genetic Learning
TL;DR: We analyze the benefit of data augmentations for overcoming the sim-to-real gap and use the results to develop a genetic learning algorithm for finding augmentation policies.
Abstract: Data augmentations are useful in closing the sim-to-real domain gap when training on synthetic data. This is because they widen the training data distribution, thus encouraging the model to generalize better to other domains. Many image augmentation techniques exist, parametrized by different settings, such as strength and probability. This leads to a large space of different possible augmentation policies. Some policies work better than others for overcoming the sim-to-real gap for specific datasets, and it is unclear why. This paper presents two different interpretable metrics that can be combined to predict how well a certain augmentation policy will work for a specific sim-to-real setting, focusing on object detection. We validate our metrics by training many models with different augmentation policies and showing a strong correlation with performance on real data. Additionally, we introduce GeneticAugment, a genetic programming method that can leverage these metrics to automatically design an augmentation policy for a specific dataset without needing to train a model.
Primary Subject Area: Domain specific data issues
Paper Type: Research paper: up to 8 pages
Participation Mode: In-person
Confirmation: I have read and agree with the workshop's policy on behalf of myself and my co-authors.
Submission Number: 62
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