Improving Mixup Calibration with Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Optimization

arXiv:2506.17874v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In many real-world applications, ensuring the robustness and stability of deep neural networks (DNNs) is crucial, particularly for image classification tasks that encounter various input perturbations. While Mixup-based data augmentation techniques have been widely adopted to enhance the resilience of trained models against such perturbations, our experiments reveal an important corruption robustness-calibration trade-off: stronger Mixup-based augmentation can improve robustness against corrupted data while substantially increasing expected calibration error (ECE). To address this challenge, we introduce DRO-Augment, a framework that integrates Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Optimization (W-DRO) with various Mixup-based data augmentation strategies to mitigate this trade-off. Our method substantially reduces ECE under strong Mixup-based augmentation while largely preserving corruption accuracy across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, CIFAR-10-C, and CIFAR-100-C. On the theoretical side, we establish novel generalization error bounds for neural networks trained using a variation-regularized loss function with augmented data, closely related to the W-DRO problem. Furthermore, we introduce a refined CIFAR-C benchmark that corrects inconsistencies in corruption intensities, providing a more reliable evaluation for future robustness research.