Unsupervised or Indirectly Supervised Learning
Generalized Semi-Supervised Learning via Self-Supervised Feature Adaptation
Traditional semi-supervised learning (SSL) assumes that the feature distributions of labeled and unlabeled data are consistent which rarely holds in realistic scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel SSL setting, where unlabeled samples are drawn from a mixed distribution that deviates from the feature distribution of labeled samples.Under this setting, previous SSL methods tend to predict wrong pseudo-labels with the model fitted on labeled data, resulting in noise accumulation. To tackle this issue, we propose \emph{Self-Supervised Feature Adaptation} (SSFA), a generic framework for improving SSL performance when labeled and unlabeled data come from different distributions. SSFA decouples the prediction of pseudo-labels from the current model to improve the quality of pseudo-labels. Particularly, SSFA incorporates a self-supervised task into the SSL framework and uses it to adapt the feature extractor of the model to the unlabeled data.
The Pursuit of Human Labeling: A New Perspective on Unsupervised Learning
We present HUME, a simple model-agnostic framework for inferring human labeling of a given dataset without any external supervision. The key insight behind our approach is that classes defined by many human labelings are linearly separable regardless of the representation space used to represent a dataset. HUME utilizes this insight to guide the search over all possible labelings of a dataset to discover an underlying human labeling. We show that the proposed optimization objective is strikingly well-correlated with the ground truth labeling of the dataset. In effect, we only train linear classifiers on top of pretrained representations that remain fixed during training, making our framework compatible with any large pretrained and self-supervised model.
Ess-InfoGAIL: Semi-supervised Imitation Learning from Imbalanced Demonstrations
Imitation learning aims to reproduce expert behaviors without relying on an explicit reward signal. However, real-world demonstrations often present challenges, such as multi-modal, data imbalance, and expensive labeling processes. In this work, we propose a novel semi-supervised imitation learning architecture that learns disentangled behavior representations from imbalanced demonstrations using limited labeled data. Specifically, our method consists of three key components. First, we adapt the concept of semi-supervised generative adversarial networks to the imitation learning context. Second, we employ a learnable latent distribution to align the generated and expert data distributions.
Dual Mean-Teacher: An Unbiased Semi-Supervised Framework for Audio-Visual Source Localization
Audio-Visual Source Localization (AVSL) aims to locate sounding objects within video frames given the paired audio clips. Existing methods predominantly rely on self-supervised contrastive learning of audio-visual correspondence. Without any bounding-box annotations, they struggle to achieve precise localization, especially for small objects, and suffer from blurry boundaries and false positives. Moreover, the naive semi-supervised method is poor in effectively utilizing the abundance of unlabeled audio-visual pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-Supervised Learning framework for AVSL, namely Dual Mean-Teacher (DMT), comprising two teacher-student structures to circumvent the confirmation bias issue.
Unsupervised Learning for Solving the Travelling Salesman Problem
We propose UTSP, an Unsupervised Learning (UL) framework for solving the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). We train a Graph Neural Network (GNN) using a surrogate loss. The GNN outputs a heat map representing the probability for each edge to be part of the optimal path. We then apply local search to generate our final prediction based on the heat map. Our loss function consists of two parts: one pushes the model to find the shortest path and the other serves as a surrogate for the constraint that the route should form a Hamiltonian Cycle.
Overcoming the curse of dimensionality with Laplacian regularization in semi-supervised learning
As annotations of data can be scarce in large-scale practical problems, leveraging unlabelled examples is one of the most important aspects of machine learning. This is the aim of semi-supervised learning. To benefit from the access to unlabelled data, it is natural to diffuse smoothly knowledge of labelled data to unlabelled one. This induces to the use of Laplacian regularization. Yet, current implementations of Laplacian regularization suffer from several drawbacks, notably the well-known curse of dimensionality.
Doubly-Robust Self-Training
Self-training is a well-established technique in semi-supervised learning, which leverages unlabeled data by generating pseudo-labels and incorporating them with a limited labeled dataset for training. The effectiveness of self-training heavily relies on the accuracy of these pseudo-labels. In this paper, we introduce doubly-robust self-training, an innovative semi-supervised algorithm that provably balances between two extremes. When pseudo-labels are entirely incorrect, our method reduces to a training process solely using labeled data. Conversely, when pseudo-labels are completely accurate, our method transforms into a training process utilizing all pseudo-labeled data and labeled data, thus increasing the effective sample size.
Cluster-aware Semi-supervised Learning: Relational Knowledge Distillation Provably Learns Clustering
Despite the empirical success and practical significance of (relational) knowledge distillation that matches (the relations of) features between teacher and student models, the corresponding theoretical interpretations remain limited for various knowledge distillation paradigms. In this work, we take an initial step toward a theoretical understanding of relational knowledge distillation (RKD), with a focus on semi-supervised classification problems. We start by casting RKD as spectral clustering on a population-induced graph unveiled by a teacher model. Via a notion of clustering error that quantifies the discrepancy between the predicted and ground truth clusterings, we illustrate that RKD over the population provably leads to low clustering error. Moreover, we provide a sample complexity bound for RKD with limited unlabeled samples.
Universal Semi-Supervised Learning
Universal Semi-Supervised Learning (UniSSL) aims to solve the open-set problem where both the class distribution (i.e., class set) and feature distribution (i.e., feature domain) are different between labeled dataset and unlabeled dataset. Such a problem seriously hinders the realistic landing of classical SSL. Different from the existing SSL methods targeting at the open-set problem that only study one certain scenario of class distribution mismatch and ignore the feature distribution mismatch, we consider a more general case where a mismatch exists in both class and feature distribution. In this case, we propose a ''Class-shAring data detection and Feature Adaptation'' (CAFA) framework which requires no prior knowledge of the class relationship between the labeled dataset and unlabeled dataset. Particularly, CAFA utilizes a novel scoring strategy to detect the data in the shared class set.
OpenMatch: Open-Set Semi-supervised Learning with Open-set Consistency Regularization
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is an effective means to leverage unlabeled data to improve a model's performance. Typical SSL methods like FixMatch assume that labeled and unlabeled data share the same label space. However, in practice, unlabeled data can contain categories unseen in the labeled set, i.e., outliers, which can significantly harm the performance of SSL algorithms. To address this problem, we propose a novel Open-set Semi-Supervised Learning (OSSL) approach called OpenMatch.Learning representations of inliers while rejecting outliers is essential for the success of OSSL. To this end, OpenMatch unifies FixMatch with novelty detection based on one-vs-all (OVA) classifiers. The OVA-classifier outputs the confidence score of a sample being an inlier, providing a threshold to detect outliers.