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Can One-Shot Test-Time Data Augmentation Help with Generalization?

Yunwei Bai Yao Shu Ying Kiat Tan Tsuhan Chen
Sep 2026
Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Computer Vision

Abstract

Data augmentation is crucial for model generalization, but existing methods are mostly centered on the training stage. Test-time augmentation, while underexplored, can be practically effective for generalization while avoiding extra model parameters or fine-tuning. Given the increasing training cost and the literature gap, we study whether it is possible to perform effective test-time augmentation using image generation from just the single original image. We first analyze the importance of test-time augmentation, and then design and study a simple yet natural operator named 1S-DAug, which comprises geometric perturbations with controlled noise injection and image-conditioned denoising. We obtain positive results on well-established image-classification benchmarks across four datasets and multiple models, achieving up to 20\% relative accuracy improvement without model training or parameter access. Code will be released.

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