Learning to Transform for Generalizable Instance-wise Invariance

Utkarsh Singhal, Carlos Esteves, Ameesh Makadia, Stella X. Yu

Abstract: Computer vision research has long aimed to build systems that are robust to transformations found in natural data. Traditionally, this is done using data augmentation or hard-coding invariances into the architecture. However, too much or too little invariance can hurt, and the correct amount is unknown a priori and dependent on the instance. Ideally, the appropriate invariance would be learned from data and inferred at test-time.We treat invariance as a prediction problem. Given any image, we predict a distribution over transformations can and average over them to make invariant predictions. Combined with a graphical model approach, this distribution forms a flexible, generalizable, and adaptive form of invariance. Our experiments show that it can be used to align datasets and discover prototypes, adapt to out-of-distribution poses, and generalize invariance across classes. When as data augmentation, our method shows accuracy and robustness gains on CIFAR 10, CIFAR10-LT, and TinyImageNet.