Bypassing the Random Input Mixing in Mixup

Mixup and its variants have promoted a surge of interest due to their capability of boosting the accuracy of deep models. For a random sample pair, such approaches generate a set of synthetic samples through interpolating both the inputs and their corresponding one-hot labels. Current methods either interpolate random features from an input pair or learn to mix salient features from the pair. Nevertheless, the former methods can create misleading synthetic samples or remove important features from the given inputs, and the latter strategies incur significant computation cost for selecting descriptive input regions. In this paper, we show that the effort needed for the input mixing can be bypassed. For a given sample pair, averaging the features from the two inputs and then assigning it with a set of soft labels can effectively regularize the training. We empirically show that the proposed approach performs on par with state-of-the-art strategies in terms of predictive accuracy.