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 Unsupervised or Indirectly Supervised Learning


Dynamic Distillation Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Recognition with Unlabeled Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

Most existing works in few-shot learning rely on meta-learning the network on a large base dataset which is typically from the same domain as the target dataset. We tackle the problem of cross-domain few-shot learning where there is a large shift between the base and target domain. The problem of cross-domain few-shot recognition with unlabeled target data is largely unaddressed in the literature. STARTUP was the first method that tackles this problem using self-training. However, it uses a fixed teacher pretrained on a labeled base dataset to create soft labels for the unlabeled target samples.


Masked Generative Adversarial Networks are Data-Efficient Generation Learners

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper shows that masked generative adversarial network (MaskedGAN) is robust image generation learners with limited training data. The idea of MaskedGAN is simple: it randomly masks out certain image information for effective GAN training with limited data. We develop two masking strategies that work along orthogonal dimensions of training images, including a shifted spatial masking that masks the images in spatial dimensions with random shifts, and a balanced spectral masking that masks certain image spectral bands with self-adaptive probabilities. The two masking strategies complement each other which together encourage more challenging holistic learning from limited training data, ultimately suppressing trivial solutions and failures in GAN training. Albeit simple, extensive experiments show that MaskedGAN achieves superior performance consistently across different network architectures (e.g., CNNs including BigGAN and StyleGAN-v2 and Transformers including TransGAN and GANformer) and datasets (e.g., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, 100-shot, AFHQ, FFHQ and Cityscapes).


Characterizing the Impacts of Semi-supervised Learning for Weak Supervision

Neural Information Processing Systems

Labeling training data is a critical and expensive step in producing high accuracy ML models, whether training from scratch or fine-tuning. To make labeling more efficient, two major approaches are programmatic weak supervision (WS) and semi-supervised learning (SSL). More recent works have either explicitly or implicitly used techniques at their intersection, but in various complex and ad hoc ways. In this work, we define a simple, modular design space to study the use of SSL techniques for WS more systematically. Surprisingly, we find that fairly simple methods from our design space match the performance of more complex state-of-the-art methods, averaging a 3 p.p. increase in accuracy/F1-score across 8 standard WS benchmarks.


MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Semi-supervised learning has proven to be a powerful paradigm for leveraging unlabeled data to mitigate the reliance on large labeled datasets. In this work, we unify the current dominant approaches for semi-supervised learning to produce a new algorithm, MixMatch, that guesses low-entropy labels for data-augmented unlabeled examples and mixes labeled and unlabeled data using MixUp. MixMatch obtains state-of-the-art results by a large margin across many datasets and labeled data amounts. For example, on CIFAR-10 with 250 labels, we reduce error rate by a factor of 4 (from 38% to 11%) and by a factor of 2 on STL-10. We also demonstrate how MixMatch can help achieve a dramatically better accuracy-privacy trade-off for differential privacy.


Self-Diagnosing GAN: Diagnosing Underrepresented Samples in Generative Adversarial Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite remarkable performance in producing realistic samples, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) often produce low-quality samples near low-density regions of the data manifold, e.g., samples of minor groups. Many techniques have been developed to improve the quality of generated samples, either by post-processing generated samples or by pre-processing the empirical data distribution, but at the cost of reduced diversity. To promote diversity in sample generation without degrading the overall quality, we propose a simple yet effective method to diagnose and emphasize underrepresented samples during training of a GAN. The main idea is to use the statistics of the discrepancy between the data distribution and the model distribution at each data instance. Based on the observation that the underrepresented samples have a high average discrepancy or high variability in discrepancy, we propose a method to emphasize those samples during training of a GAN.


InstanT: Semi-supervised Learning with Instance-dependent Thresholds

Neural Information Processing Systems

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has been a fundamental challenge in machine learning for decades. The primary family of SSL algorithms, known as pseudo-labeling, involves assigning pseudo-labels to confident unlabeled instances and incorporating them into the training set. Therefore, the selection criteria of confident instances are crucial to the success of SSL. Recently, there has been growing interest in the development of SSL methods that use dynamic or adaptive thresholds. Yet, these methods typically apply the same threshold to all samples, or use class-dependent thresholds for instances belonging to a certain class, while neglecting instance-level information.


FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence

Neural Information Processing Systems

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides an effective means of leveraging unlabeled data to improve a model's performance. This domain has seen fast progress recently, at the cost of requiring more complex methods. In this paper we propose FixMatch, an algorithm that is a significant simplification of existing SSL methods. FixMatch first generates pseudo-labels using the model's predictions on weakly-augmented unlabeled images. For a given image, the pseudo-label is only retained if the model produces a high-confidence prediction.


Unsupervised Learning of Equivariant Structure from Sequences

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this study, we present \textit{meta-sequential prediction} (MSP), an unsupervised framework to learn the symmetry from the time sequence of length at least three. We will demonstrate that, with our framework, the hidden disentangled structure of the dataset naturally emerges as a by-product by applying \textit{simultaneous block-diagonalization} to the transition operators in the latent space, the procedure which is commonly used in representation theory to decompose the feature-space based on the type of response to group actions.We will showcase our method from both empirical and theoretical perspectives.Our result suggests that finding a simple structured relation and learning a model with extrapolation capability are two sides of the same coin.


Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

We observe that despite their hierarchical convolutional nature, the synthesis process of typical generative adversarial networks depends on absolute pixel coordinates in an unhealthy manner. This manifests itself as, e.g., detail appearing to be glued to image coordinates instead of the surfaces of depicted objects. We trace the root cause to careless signal processing that causes aliasing in the generator network. Interpreting all signals in the network as continuous, we derive generally applicable, small architectural changes that guarantee that unwanted information cannot leak into the hierarchical synthesis process. The resulting networks match the FID of StyleGAN2 but differ dramatically in their internal representations, and they are fully equivariant to translation and rotation even at subpixel scales.


Towards Generic Semi-Supervised Framework for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Volume-wise labeling in 3D medical images is a time-consuming task that requires expertise. As a result, there is growing interest in using semi-supervised learning (SSL) techniques to train models with limited labeled data. However, the challenges and practical applications extend beyond SSL to settings such as unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) and semi-supervised domain generalization (SemiDG). This work aims to develop a generic SSL framework that can handle all three settings. We identify two main obstacles to achieving this goal in the existing SSL framework: 1) the weakness of capturing distribution-invariant features; and 2) the tendency for unlabeled data to be overwhelmed by labeled data, leading to over-fitting to the labeled data during training.