About data augmentation

[guantinglin]

Hi, may I ask a question about the description in the paper?

As you mentioned in paper in the last paragraph of chapter 3.1:

"the stronger the data augmentation is, the smaller the N will be. The small neighboring region of a sample is a way to capture all near-duplicates and instances that can be obtained by data augmentation"

Shouldn't stronger data augmentation technique provide more samples of the same class(S) that makes the volume of them (N) larger?

[richardaecn]

Hi @guantinglin, "Presumably, the stronger the data augmentation is, the smaller the N will be" is a hypothesis that not verified by experiments. The intuition is that the stronger the data augmentation is, the more near-duplicate samples can be augmented, therefore the total number of unique samples N would be smaller.