The success of deep learning in medical imaging is mostly achieved at the cost of a large labeled data set. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a promising solution by leveraging the structure of unlabeled data to improve learning from a small set of labeled data. Self-ensembling is a simple approach used in SSL to encourage consensus among ensemble predictions of unknown labels, improving generalization of the model by making it more insensitive to the latent space. Currently, such an ensemble is obtained by randomization such as dropout regularization and random data augmentation. In this work, we hypothesize -- from the generalization perspective -- that self-ensembling can be improved by exploiting the stochasticity of a disentangled latent space. To this end, we present a stacked SSL model that utilizes unsupervised disentangled representation learning as the stochastic embedding for self-ensembling. We evaluate the presented model for multi-label classification using chest X-ray images, demonstrating its improved performance over related SSL models as well as the interpretability of its disentangled representations.
Besideds the approaches discussed above, there is also an active line of research in GAN-based SSL methods @cite_7 @cite_5 . The general idea is to add a classification objective to the original mini-max game and increases the capacity of the discriminator to associate the inputs to the corresponding labels. The presented work differs from this line of research by the emphasis on obtaining, regularizing, and interpreting the latent representations in SSL.
@cite_5 @cite_7
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Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) have shown promise in image generation and semi-supervised learning (SSL). However, existing GANs in SSL have two problems: (1) the generator and the discriminator (i.e. the classifier) may not be optimal at the same time; and (2) the generator cannot control the semantics of the generated samples. The problems essentially arise from the two-player formulation, where a single discriminator shares incompatible roles of identifying fake samples and predicting labels and it only estimates the data without considering the labels. To address the problems, we present triple generative adversarial net (Triple-GAN), which consists of three players---a generator, a discriminator and a classifier. The generator and the classifier characterize the conditional distributions between images and labels, and the discriminator solely focuses on identifying fake image-label pairs. We design compatible utilities to ensure that the distributions characterized by the classifier and the generator both converge to the data distribution. Our results on various datasets demonstrate that Triple-GAN as a unified model can simultaneously (1) achieve the state-of-the-art classification results among deep generative models, and (2) disentangle the classes and styles of the input and transfer smoothly in the data space via interpolation in the latent space class-conditionally. Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) have shown promise in image generation and semi-supervised learning (SSL). However, existing GANs in SSL have two problems: (1) the generator and the discriminator (i.e. the classifier) may not be optimal at the same time; and (2) the generator cannot control the semantics of the generated samples. The problems essentially arise from the two-player formulation, where a single discriminator shares incompatible roles of identifying fake samples and predicting labels and it only estimates the data without considering the labels. To address the problems, we present triple generative adversarial net (Triple-GAN), which consists of three players---a generator, a discriminator and a classifier. The generator and the classifier characterize the conditional distributions between images and labels, and the discriminator solely focuses on identifying fake image-label pairs. We design compatible utilities to ensure that the distributions characterized by the classifier and the generator both converge to the data distribution. Our results on various datasets demonstrate that Triple-GAN as a unified model can simultaneously (1) achieve the state-of-the-art classification results among deep generative models, and (2) disentangle the classes and styles of the input and transfer smoothly in the data space via interpolation in the latent space class-conditionally. We propose in this paper a new approach to train the Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) with a mixture of generators to overcome the mode collapsing problem. The main intuition is to employ multiple generators, instead of using a single one as in the original GAN. The idea is simple, yet proven to be extremely effective at covering diverse data modes, easily overcoming the mode collapsing problem and delivering state-of-the-art results. A minimax formulation was able to establish among a classifier, a discriminator, and a set of generators in a similar spirit with GAN. Generators create samples that are intended to come from the same distribution as the training data, whilst the discriminator determines whether samples are true data or generated by generators, and the classifier specifies which generator a sample comes from. The distinguishing feature is that internal samples are created from multiple generators, and then one of them will be randomly selected as final output similar to the mechanism of a probabilistic mixture model. We term our method Mixture Generative Adversarial Nets (MGAN). We develop theoretical analysis to prove that, at the equilibrium, the Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD) between the mixture of generators’ distributions and the empirical data distribution is minimal, whilst the JSD among generators’ distributions is maximal, hence effectively avoiding the mode collapsing problem. By utilizing parameter sharing, our proposed model adds minimal computational cost to the standard GAN, and thus can also efficiently scale to large-scale datasets. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic 2D data and natural image databases (CIFAR-10, STL-10 and ImageNet) to demonstrate the superior performance of our MGAN in achieving state-of-the-art Inception scores over latest baselines, generating diverse and appealing recognizable objects at different resolutions, and specializing in capturing different types of objects by the generators. We propose in this paper a novel approach to tackle the problem of mode collapse encountered in generative adversarial network (GAN). Our idea is intuitive but proven to be very effective, especially in addressing some key limitations of GAN. In essence, it combines the Kullback-Leibler (KL) and reverse KL divergences into a unified objective function, thus it exploits the complementary statistical properties from these divergences to effectively diversify the estimated density in capturing multi-modes. We term our method dual discriminator generative adversarial nets (D2GAN) which, unlike GAN, has two discriminators; and together with a generator, it also has the analogy of a minimax game, wherein a discriminator rewards high scores for samples from data distribution whilst another discriminator, conversely, favoring data from the generator, and the generator produces data to fool both two discriminators. We develop theoretical analysis to show that, given the maximal discriminators, optimizing the generator of D2GAN reduces to minimizing both KL and reverse KL divergences between data distribution and the distribution induced from the data generated by the generator, hence effectively avoiding the mode collapsing problem. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world large-scale datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10, STL-10, ImageNet), where we have made our best effort to compare our D2GAN with the latest state-of-the-art GAN's variants in comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations. The experimental results demonstrate the competitive and superior performance of our approach in generating good quality and diverse samples over baselines, and the capability of our method to scale up to ImageNet database.