An Alternative Auxiliary Task for Enhancing Image Classification

Image reconstruction is likely the most predominant auxiliary task for image classification. In this paper, we investigate ``estimating the Fourier Transform of the input image" as a potential alternative auxiliary task, in the hope that it may further boost the performances on the primary task or introduce novel constraints not well covered by image reconstruction. We experimented with five popular classification architectures on the CIFAR-10 dataset, and the empirical results indicated that our proposed auxiliary task generally improves the classification accuracy. More notably, the results showed that in certain cases our proposed auxiliary task may enhance the classifiers' resistance to adversarial attacks generated using the fast gradient sign method.