Dynamic Nonlinear Mixup with Distance-based Sample Selection

Abstract

Data augmentation with mixup has shown to be effective on the NLP tasks. Although its great success, the mixup still has shortcomings. First, vanilla mixup randomly selects one sample to generate the mixup sample for a given sample. It remains unclear how to best choose the input samples for the mixup. Second, linear interpolation limits the space of synthetic data and its regularization effect. In this paper, we propose the dynamic nonlinear mixup with distance-based sample selection, which not only generates multiple sample pairs based on the distance between each sample but also enlarges the space of synthetic samples. Specifically, we compute the distance between each input data by cosine similarity and select multiple samples for a given sample. Then we use the dynamic nonlinear mixup to fuse sample pairs. It does not use a linear, scalar mixing strategy, but a nonlinear interpolation strategy, where the mixing strategy is adaptively updated for the input and label pairs. Experiments on the multiple public datasets demonstrate that dynamic nonlinear mixup outperforms state-of-the-art methods.