Recent advances in semi-supervised learning have shown tremendous potential in overcoming a major barrier to the success of modern machine learning algorithms: access to vast amounts of human-labeled training data. Algorithms based on self-ensemble learning and virtual adversarial training can harness the abundance of unlabeled data to produce impressive state-of-the-art results on a number of semi-supervised benchmarks, approaching the performance of strong supervised baselines using only a fraction of the available labeled data. However, these methods often require careful tuning of many hyper-parameters and are usually not easy to implement in practice. In this work, we present a conceptually simple yet effective semi-supervised algorithm based on self-supervised learning to combine semantic feature representations from unlabeled data. Our models are efficiently trained end-to-end for the joint, multi-task learning of labeled and unlabeled data in a single stage. Striving for simplicity and practicality, our approach requires no additional hyper-parameters to tune for optimal performance beyond the standard set for training convolutional neural networks. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of our models for semi-supervised image classification on SVHN, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, and demonstrate results competitive with, and in some cases exceeding, prior state of the art. Reference code and data are available at this https URL
Models belonging to the self-ensembling class, such as Pseudo-Ensembles @cite_6 , Ladder networks @cite_7 , @math model @cite_13 and Mean Teacher @cite_44 , utilize the output predictions on unlabeled data as proxy labels for SSL. This class of methods considers the model as a stochastic prediction function, in which different model configurations, such as dropout @cite_34 and data augmentation, along with varying levels of noise in the input data can produce drastically different output predictions. The unsupervised objective of self-ensemble models is to minimize the mean squared error of multiple model outputs under random perturbations and data augmentation for the same training examples. The motivation behind this approach is to further regularize the model through the principle that perturbations in the input data and or data augmentation techniques should not significantly change the output of the model @cite_46 . Self-ensembling approaches are robust to random perturbations and geometric transformations, and are currently among the state of the art in SSL on several benchmark image classification datasets.
@cite_7 @cite_6 @cite_44 @cite_46 @cite_34 @cite_13
2963558289 2592691248 2953070460 2530816535
The recently proposed self-ensembling methods have achieved promising results in deep semi-supervised learning, which penalize inconsistent predictions of unlabeled data under different perturbations. However, they only consider adding perturbations to each single data point, while ignoring the connections between data samples. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called Smooth Neighbors on Teacher Graphs (SNTG). In SNTG, a graph is constructed based on the predictions of the teacher model, i.e., the implicit self-ensemble of models. Then the graph serves as a similarity measure with respect to which the representations of "similar" neighboring points are learned to be smooth on the low-dimensional manifold. We achieve state-of-the-art results on semi-supervised learning benchmarks. The error rates are 9.89 , 3.99 for CIFAR-10 with 4000 labels, SVHN with 500 labels, respectively. In particular, the improvements are significant when the labels are fewer. For the non-augmented MNIST with only 20 labels, the error rate is reduced from previous 4.81 to 1.36 . Our method also shows robustness to noisy labels. The recently proposed Temporal Ensembling has achieved state-of-the-art results in several semi-supervised learning benchmarks. It maintains an exponential moving average of label predictions on each training example, and penalizes predictions that are inconsistent with this target. However, because the targets change only once per epoch, Temporal Ensembling becomes unwieldy when learning large datasets. To overcome this problem, we propose Mean Teacher, a method that averages model weights instead of label predictions. As an additional benefit, Mean Teacher improves test accuracy and enables training with fewer labels than Temporal Ensembling. Without changing the network architecture, Mean Teacher achieves an error rate of 4.35 on SVHN with 250 labels, outperforming Temporal Ensembling trained with 1000 labels. We also show that a good network architecture is crucial to performance. Combining Mean Teacher and Residual Networks, we improve the state of the art on CIFAR-10 with 4000 labels from 10.55 to 6.28 , and on ImageNet 2012 with 10 of the labels from 35.24 to 9.11 . The recently proposed Temporal Ensembling has achieved state-of-the-art results in several semi-supervised learning benchmarks. It maintains an exponential moving average of label predictions on each training example, and penalizes predictions that are inconsistent with this target. However, because the targets change only once per epoch, Temporal Ensembling becomes unwieldy when learning large datasets. To overcome this problem, we propose Mean Teacher, a method that averages model weights instead of label predictions. As an additional benefit, Mean Teacher improves test accuracy and enables training with fewer labels than Temporal Ensembling. Without changing the network architecture, Mean Teacher achieves an error rate of 4.35 on SVHN with 250 labels, outperforming Temporal Ensembling trained with 1000 labels. We also show that a good network architecture is crucial to performance. Combining Mean Teacher and Residual Networks, we improve the state of the art on CIFAR-10 with 4000 labels from 10.55 to 6.28 , and on ImageNet 2012 with 10 of the labels from 35.24 to 9.11 . In this paper, we present a simple and efficient method for training deep neural networks in a semi-supervised setting where only a small portion of training data is labeled. We introduce self-ensembling, where we form a consensus prediction of the unknown labels using the outputs of the network-in-training on different epochs, and most importantly, under different regularization and input augmentation conditions. This ensemble prediction can be expected to be a better predictor for the unknown labels than the output of the network at the most recent training epoch, and can thus be used as a target for training. Using our method, we set new records for two standard semi-supervised learning benchmarks, reducing the (non-augmented) classification error rate from 18.44 to 7.05 in SVHN with 500 labels and from 18.63 to 16.55 in CIFAR-10 with 4000 labels, and further to 5.12 and 12.16 by enabling the standard augmentations. We additionally obtain a clear improvement in CIFAR-100 classification accuracy by using random images from the Tiny Images dataset as unlabeled extra inputs during training. Finally, we demonstrate good tolerance to incorrect labels.