In many real-world scenarios, labeled data for a specific machine learning task is costly to obtain. Semi-supervised training methods make use of abundantly available unlabeled data and a smaller number of labeled examples. We propose a new framework for semi-supervised training of deep neural networks inspired by learning in humans. "Associations" are made from embeddings of labeled samples to those of unlabeled ones and back. The optimization schedule encourages correct association cycles that end up at the same class from which the association was started and penalizes wrong associations ending at a different class. The implementation is easy to use and can be added to any existing end-to-end training setup. We demonstrate the capabilities of learning by association on several data sets and show that it can improve performance on classification tasks tremendously by making use of additionally available unlabeled data. In particular, for cases with few labeled data, our training scheme outperforms the current state of the art on SVHN.
We present a variety of new architectural features and training procedures that we apply to the generative adversarial networks (GANs) framework. We focus on two applications of GANs: semi-supervised learning, and the generation of images that humans find visually realistic. Unlike most work on generative models, our primary goal is not to train a model that assigns high likelihood to test data, nor do we require the model to be able to learn well without using any labels. Using our new techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised classification on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN. The generated images are of high quality as confirmed by a visual Turing test: our model generates MNIST samples that humans cannot distinguish from real data, and CIFAR-10 samples that yield a human error rate of 21.3 . We also present ImageNet samples with unprecedented resolution and show that our methods enable the model to learn recognizable features of ImageNet classes.