  Recent work has shown that deep vision models tend to be overly dependent on
low-level or "texture" features, leading to poor generalization. Various data
augmentation strategies have been proposed to overcome this so-called texture
bias in DNNs. We propose a simple, lightweight adversarial augmentation
technique that explicitly incentivizes the network to learn holistic shapes for
accurate prediction in an object classification setting. Our augmentations
superpose edgemaps from one image onto another image with shuffled patches,
using a randomly determined mixing proportion, with the image label of the
edgemap image. To classify these augmented images, the model needs to not only
detect and focus on edges but distinguish between relevant and spurious edges.
We show that our augmentations significantly improve classification accuracy
and robustness measures on a range of datasets and neural architectures. As an
example, for ViT-S, We obtain absolute gains on classification accuracy gains
up to 6%. We also obtain gains of up to 28% and 8.5% on natural adversarial and
out-of-distribution datasets like ImageNet-A (for ViT-B) and ImageNet-R (for
ViT-S), respectively. Analysis using a range of probe datasets shows
substantially increased shape sensitivity in our trained models, explaining the
observed improvement in robustness and classification accuracy.
