Unsupervised or Indirectly Supervised Learning
A Square Peg in a Square Hole: Meta-Expert for Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning
This paper studies the long-tailed semi-supervised learning (LTSSL) with distribution mismatch, where the class distribution of the labeled training data follows a long-tailed distribution and mismatches with that of the unlabeled training data. Most existing methods introduce auxiliary classifiers (experts) to model various unlabeled data distributions and produce pseudo-labels, but the expertises of various experts are not fully utilized. We observe that different experts are good at predicting different intervals of samples, e.g., long-tailed expert is skilled in samples located in the head interval and uniform expert excels in samples located in the medium interval. Therefore, we propose a dynamic expert assignment module that can estimate the class membership (i.e., head, medium, or tail class) of samples, and dynamically assigns suitable expert to each sample based on the estimated membership to produce high-quality pseudo-label in the training phase and produce prediction in the testing phase. We also theoretically reveal that integrating different experts' strengths will lead to a smaller generalization error bound. Moreover, we find that the deeper features are more biased toward the head class but with more discriminative ability, while the shallower features are less biased but also with less discriminative ability. We, therefore, propose a multi-depth feature fusion module to utilize different depth features to mitigate the model bias. Our method demonstrates its effectiveness through comprehensive experiments on the CIFAR-10-LT, STL-10-LT, and SVHN-LT datasets across various settings.
SPARSE Data, Rich Results: Few-Shot Semi-Supervised Learning via Class-Conditioned Image Translation
Manni, Guido, Lauretti, Clemente, Zollo, Loredana, Soda, Paolo
Deep learning has revolutionized medical imaging, but its effectiveness is severely limited by insufficient labeled training data. This paper introduces a novel GAN-based semi-supervised learning framework specifically designed for low labeled-data regimes, evaluated across settings with 5 to 50 labeled samples per class. Our approach integrates three specialized neural networks -- a generator for class-conditioned image translation, a discriminator for authenticity assessment and classification, and a dedicated classifier -- within a three-phase training framework. The method alternates between supervised training on limited labeled data and unsupervised learning that leverages abundant unlabeled images through image-to-image translation rather than generation from noise. We employ ensemble-based pseudo-labeling that combines confidence-weighted predictions from the discriminator and classifier with temporal consistency through exponential moving averaging, enabling reliable label estimation for unlabeled data. Comprehensive evaluation across eleven MedMNIST datasets demonstrates that our approach achieves statistically significant improvements over six state-of-the-art GAN-based semi-supervised methods, with particularly strong performance in the extreme 5-shot setting where the scarcity of labeled data is most challenging. The framework maintains its superiority across all evaluated settings (5, 10, 20, and 50 shots per class). Our approach offers a practical solution for medical imaging applications where annotation costs are prohibitive, enabling robust classification performance even with minimal labeled data. Code is available at https://github.com/GuidoManni/SPARSE.
Divide-and-Conquer for Enhancing Unlabeled Learning, Stability, and Plasticity in Semi-supervised Continual Learning
Duan, Yue, Chen, Taicai, Qi, Lei, Shi, Yinghuan
Semi-supervised continual learning (SSCL) seeks to leverage both labeled and unlabeled data in a sequential learning setup, aiming to reduce annotation costs while managing continual data arrival. SSCL introduces complex challenges, including ensuring effective unlabeled learning (UL), while balancing memory stability (MS) and learning plasticity (LP). Previous SSCL efforts have typically focused on isolated aspects of the three, while this work presents USP, a divide-and-conquer framework designed to synergistically enhance these three aspects: (1) Feature Space Reservation (FSR) strategy for LP, which constructs reserved feature locations for future classes by shaping old classes into an equiangular tight frame; (2) Divide-and-Conquer Pseudo-labeling (DCP) approach for UL, which assigns reliable pseudo-labels across both high- and low-confidence unlabeled data; and (3) Class-mean-anchored Unlabeled Distillation (CUD) for MS, which reuses DCP's outputs to anchor unlabeled data to stable class means for distillation to prevent forgetting. Comprehensive evaluations show USP outperforms prior SSCL methods, with gains up to 5.94% in the last accuracy, validating its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/NJUyued/USP4SSCL.
Secure Text Mail Encryption with Generative Adversarial Networks
This work presents an encryption model based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Encryption of RTF-8 data is realized by dynamically generating decimal numbers that lead to the encryption and decryption of alphabetic strings in integer representation by simple addition rules, the modulus of the dimension of the considered alphabet. The binary numbers for the private dynamic keys correspond to the binary numbers of public reference keys, as defined by a specific GAN configuration. For reversible encryption with a bijective mapping between dynamic and reference keys, as defined by the GAN encryptor, secure text encryption can be achieved by transferring a GAN-encrypted public key along with the encrypted text from a sender to a receiver. Using the technique described above, secure text mail transfer can be realized through component-wise encryption and decryption of text mail strings, with total key sizes of up to $10^{8}$ bits that define random decimal numbers generated by the GAN. From the present model, we assert that encrypted texts can be transmitted more efficiently and securely than from RSA encryption, as long as users of the specific configuration of the GAN encryption model are unaware of the GAN encryptor circuit and configuration, respectively.
Graph Representation Learning with Massive Unlabeled Data for Rumor Detection
With the development of social media, rumors spread quickly, cause great harm to society and economy. Thereby, many effective rumor detection methods have been developed, among which the rumor propagation structure learning based methods are particularly effective compared to other methods. However, the existing methods still suffer from many issues including the difficulty to obtain large-scale labeled rumor datasets, which leads to the low generalization ability and the performance degeneration on new events since rumors are time-critical and usually appear with hot topics or newly emergent events. In order to solve the above problems, in this study, we used large-scale unlabeled topic datasets crawled from the social media platform Weibo and Twitter with claim propagation structure to improve the semantic learning ability of a graph reprentation learing model on various topics. We use three typical graph self-supervised methods, InfoGraph, JOAO and GraphMAE in two commonly used training strategies, to verify the performance of general graph semi-supervised methods in rumor detection tasks. In addition, for alleviating the time and topic difference between unlabeled topic data and rumor data, we also collected a rumor dataset covering a variety of topics over a decade (10-year ago from 2022) from the Weibo rumor-refuting platform. Our experiments show that these general graph self-supervised learning methods outperform previous methods specifically designed for rumor detection tasks and achieve good performance under few-shot conditions, demonstrating the better generalization ability with the help of our massive unlabeled topic dataset.
CORE-ReID V2: Advancing the Domain Adaptation for Object Re-Identification with Optimized Training and Ensemble Fusion
Nguyen, Trinh Quoc, Prima, Oky Dicky Ardiansyah, Irfan, Syahid Al, Purnomo, Hindriyanto Dwi, Tanone, Radius
This study presents CORE-ReID V2, an enhanced framework building upon CORE-ReID. The new framework extends its predecessor by addressing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) challenges in Person ReID and Vehicle ReID, with further applicability to Object ReID. During pre-training, CycleGAN is employed to synthesize diverse data, bridging image characteristic gaps across different domains. In the fine-tuning, an advanced ensemble fusion mechanism, consisting of the Efficient Channel Attention Block (ECAB) and the Simplified Efficient Channel Attention Block (SECAB), enhances both local and global feature representations while reducing ambiguity in pseudo-labels for target samples. Experimental results on widely used UDA Person ReID and Vehicle ReID datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving top performance in Mean Average Precision (mAP) and Rank-k Accuracy (Top-1, Top-5, Top-10). Moreover, the framework supports lightweight backbones such as ResNet18 and ResNet34, ensuring both scalability and efficiency. Our work not only pushes the boundaries of UDA-based Object ReID but also provides a solid foundation for further research and advancements in this domain. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/TrinhQuocNguyen/CORE-ReID-V2.
Learning Latent Representations for Image Translation using Frequency Distributed CycleGAN
Nigam, Shivangi, Behera, Adarsh Prasad, Verma, Shekhar, Nagabhushan, P.
--This paper presents Fd-CycleGAN, an image-to-image (I2I) translation framework that enhances latent representation learning to approximate real data distributions. Building upon the foundation of CycleGAN, our approach integrates Local Neighborhood Encoding (LNE) and Frequency-aware supervision to capture fine-grained local pixel semantics while preserving structural coherence from the source domain. We employ distribution-based loss metrics, including KL/JS Divergence and log-based similarity measures, to explicitly quantify the alignment between real and generated image distributions in both spatial and frequency domains. T o validate the efficacy of Fd-CycleGAN, we conduct experiments on diverse datasets--Horse2Zebra, Monet2Photo, and a synthetically augmented Strike-off dataset. Compared to baseline CycleGAN and other state-of-the-art methods, our approach demonstrates superior perceptual quality, faster convergence, and improved mode diversity, particularly in low-data regimes. By effectively capturing local and global distribution characteristics, Fd-CycleGAN achieves more visually coherent and semantically consistent translations. Our results suggest that frequency-guided latent learning significantly improves generalization in image translation tasks, with promising applications in document restoration, artistic style transfer, and medical image synthesis. We also provide comparative insights with diffusion-based generative models, highlighting the advantages of our lightweight adversarial approach in terms of training efficiency and qualitative output. Domain Translation (DT), also referred to as I2I translation, involves learning a mapping between two visual domains, often in the absence of paired data. This task has become central to several vision tasks. For these tasks, generative models have been widely adopted [1]-[3].
Soft Separation and Distillation: Toward Global Uniformity in Federated Unsupervised Learning
Fang, Hung-Chieh, Lin, Hsuan-Tien, King, Irwin, Zhang, Yifei
Federated Unsupervised Learning (FUL) aims to learn expressive representations in federated and self-supervised settings. The quality of representations learned in FUL is usually determined by uniformity, a measure of how uniformly representations are distributed in the embedding space. However, existing solutions perform well in achieving intra-client (local) uniformity for local models while failing to achieve inter-client (global) uniformity after aggregation due to non-IID data distributions and the decentralized nature of FUL. T o address this issue, we propose Soft Separation and Distillation (SSD), a novel approach that preserves inter-client uniformity by encouraging client representations to spread toward different directions. This design reduces interference during client model aggregation, thereby improving global uniformity while preserving local representation expressiveness. W e further enhance this effect by introducing a projector distillation module to address the discrepancy between loss optimization and representation quality. W e evaluate SSD in both cross-silo and cross-device federated settings, demonstrating consistent improvements in representation quality and task performance across various training scenarios. Our results highlight the importance of inter-client uniformity in FUL and establish SSD as an effective solution to this challenge.
CaliMatch: Adaptive Calibration for Improving Safe Semi-supervised Learning
Bae, Jinsoo, Kim, Seoung Bum, Do, Hyungrok
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) uses unlabeled data to improve the performance of machine learning models when labeled data is scarce. However, its real-world applications often face the label distribution mismatch problem, in which the unlabeled dataset includes instances whose ground-truth labels are absent from the labeled training dataset. Recent studies, referred to as safe SSL, have addressed this issue by using both classification and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. However, the existing methods may suffer from overconfidence in deep neural networks, leading to increased SSL errors because of high confidence in incorrect pseudo-labels or OOD detection. T o address this, we propose a novel method, CaliMatch, which calibrates both the classifier and the OOD detector to foster safe SSL. CaliMatch presents adaptive label smoothing and temperature scaling, which eliminates the need to manually tune the smoothing degree for effective calibration. W e give a theoretical justification for why improving the calibration of both the classifier and the OOD detector is crucial in safe SSL. Extensive evaluations on CIF AR-10, CIF AR-100, SVHN, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet demonstrate that CaliMatch outperforms the existing methods in safe SSL tasks.
Enhancement of Quantum Semi-Supervised Learning via Improved Laplacian and Poisson Methods
Gholipour, Hamed, Bozorgnia, Farid, Mohammadigheymasi, Hamzeh, Hambarde, Kailash, Mancilla, Javier, Proenca, Hugo, Neves, Joao, Challenger, Moharram
This paper develops a hybrid quantum approach for graph-based semi-supervised learning to enhance performance in scenarios where labeled data is scarce. We introduce two enhanced quantum models, the Improved Laplacian Quantum Semi-Supervised Learning (ILQSSL) and the Improved Poisson Quantum Semi-Supervised Learning (IPQSSL), that incorporate advanced label propagation strategies within variational quantum circuits. These models utilize QR decomposition to embed graph structure directly into quantum states, thereby enabling more effective learning in low-label settings. We validate our methods across four benchmark datasets like Iris, Wine, Heart Disease, and German Credit Card -- and show that both ILQSSL and IPQSSL consistently outperform leading classical semi-supervised learning algorithms, particularly under limited supervision. Beyond standard performance metrics, we examine the effect of circuit depth and qubit count on learning quality by analyzing entanglement entropy and Randomized Benchmarking (RB). Our results suggest that while some level of entanglement improves the model's ability to generalize, increased circuit complexity may introduce noise that undermines performance on current quantum hardware. Overall, the study highlights the potential of quantum-enhanced models for semi-supervised learning, offering practical insights into how quantum circuits can be designed to balance expressivity and stability. These findings support the role of quantum machine learning in advancing data-efficient classification, especially in applications constrained by label availability and hardware limitations.