Unsupervised or Indirectly Supervised Learning
Towards Realistic Long-tailed Semi-supervised Learning in an Open World
Open-world long-tailed semi-supervised learning (OLSSL) has increasingly attracted attention. However, existing OLSSL algorithms generally assume that the distributions between known and novel categories are nearly identical. Against this backdrop, we construct a more \emph{Realistic Open-world Long-tailed Semi-supervised Learning} (\textbf{ROLSSL}) setting where there is no premise on the distribution relationships between known and novel categories. Furthermore, even within the known categories, the number of labeled samples is significantly smaller than that of the unlabeled samples, as acquiring valid annotations is often prohibitively costly in the real world. Under the proposed ROLSSL setting, we propose a simple yet potentially effective solution called dual-stage post-hoc logit adjustments. The proposed approach revisits the logit adjustment strategy by considering the relationships among the frequency of samples, the total number of categories, and the overall size of data. Then, it estimates the distribution of unlabeled data for both known and novel categories to dynamically readjust the corresponding predictive probabilities, effectively mitigating category bias during the learning of known and novel classes with more selective utilization of imbalanced unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on datasets such as CIFAR100 and ImageNet100 have demonstrated performance improvements of up to 50.1\%, validating the superiority of our proposed method and establishing a strong baseline for this task. For further researches, the anonymous link to the experimental code is at \href{https://github.com/heyuanpengpku/ROLSSL}{\textcolor{brightpink}{https://github.com/heyuanpengpku/ROLSSL}}
Unleashing the Power of Unlabeled Data: A Self-supervised Learning Framework for Cyber Attack Detection in Smart Grids
Zeng, Hanyu, Zhou, Pengfei, Lou, Xin, Ng, Zhen Wei, Yau, David K. Y., Winslett, Marianne
Modern power grids are undergoing significant changes driven by information and communication technologies (ICTs), and evolving into smart grids with higher efficiency and lower operation cost. Using ICTs, however, comes with an inevitable side effect that makes the power system more vulnerable to cyber attacks. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised learning-based framework to detect and identify various types of cyber attacks. Different from existing approaches, the proposed framework does not rely on large amounts of well-curated labeled data but makes use of the massive unlabeled data in the wild which are easily accessible. Specifically, the proposed framework adopts the BERT model from the natural language processing domain and learns generalizable and effective representations from the unlabeled sensing data, which capture the distinctive patterns of different attacks. Using the learned representations, together with a very small amount of labeled data, we can train a task-specific classifier to detect various types of cyber attacks. Meanwhile, real-world training datasets are usually imbalanced, i.e., there are only a limited number of data samples containing attacks. In order to cope with such data imbalance, we propose a new loss function, separate mean error (SME), which pays equal attention to the large and small categories to better train the model. Experiment results in a 5-area power grid system with 37 buses demonstrate the superior performance of our framework over existing approaches, especially when a very limited portion of labeled data are available, e.g., as low as 0.002\%. We believe such a framework can be easily adopted to detect a variety of cyber attacks in other power grid scenarios.
Collaboration of Teachers for Semi-supervised Object Detection
Chen, Liyu, Tang, Huaao, Wen, Yi, Chen, Hanting, Li, Wei, Liu, Junchao, Hu, Jie
Recent semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) has achieved remarkable progress by leveraging unlabeled data for training. Mainstream SSOD methods rely on Consistency Regularization methods and Exponential Moving Average (EMA), which form a cyclic data flow. However, the EMA updating training approach leads to weight coupling between the teacher and student models. This coupling in a cyclic data flow results in a decrease in the utilization of unlabeled data information and the confirmation bias on low-quality or erroneous pseudo-labels. To address these issues, we propose the Collaboration of Teachers Framework (CTF), which consists of multiple pairs of teacher and student models for training. In the learning process of CTF, the Data Performance Consistency Optimization module (DPCO) informs the best pair of teacher models possessing the optimal pseudo-labels during the past training process, and these most reliable pseudo-labels generated by the best performing teacher would guide the other student models. As a consequence, this framework greatly improves the utilization of unlabeled data and prevents the positive feedback cycle of unreliable pseudo-labels. The CTF achieves outstanding results on numerous SSOD datasets, including a 0.71% mAP improvement on the 10% annotated COCO dataset and a 0.89% mAP improvement on the VOC dataset compared to LabelMatch and converges significantly faster. Moreover, the CTF is plug-and-play and can be integrated with other mainstream SSOD methods.
A Masked Semi-Supervised Learning Approach for Otago Micro Labels Recognition
Shang, Meng, Dedeyne, Lenore, Dupont, Jolan, Vercauteren, Laura, Amini, Nadjia, Lapauw, Laurence, Gielen, Evelien, Verschueren, Sabine, Varon, Carolina, De Raedt, Walter, Vanrumste, Bart
The Otago Exercise Program (OEP) serves as a vital rehabilitation initiative for older adults, aiming to enhance their strength and balance, and consequently prevent falls. While Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems have been widely employed in recognizing the activities of individuals, existing systems focus on the duration of macro activities (i.e. a sequence of repetitions of the same exercise), neglecting the ability to discern micro activities (i.e. the individual repetitions of the exercises), in the case of OEP. This study presents a novel semi-supervised machine learning approach aimed at bridging this gap in recognizing the micro activities of OEP. To manage the limited dataset size, our model utilizes a Transformer encoder for feature extraction, subsequently classified by a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). Simultaneously, the Transformer encoder is employed for masked unsupervised learning to reconstruct input signals. Results indicate that the masked unsupervised learning task enhances the performance of the supervised learning (classification task), as evidenced by f1-scores surpassing the clinically applicable threshold of 0.8. From the micro activities, two clinically relevant outcomes emerge: counting the number of repetitions of each exercise and calculating the velocity during chair rising. These outcomes enable the automatic monitoring of exercise intensity and difficulty in the daily lives of older adults.
Robust Semi-supervised Learning by Wisely Leveraging Open-set Data
Yang, Yang, Jiang, Nan, Xu, Yi, Zhan, De-Chuan
Open-set Semi-supervised Learning (OSSL) holds a realistic setting that unlabeled data may come from classes unseen in the labeled set, i.e., out-of-distribution (OOD) data, which could cause performance degradation in conventional SSL models. To handle this issue, except for the traditional in-distribution (ID) classifier, some existing OSSL approaches employ an extra OOD detection module to avoid the potential negative impact of the OOD data. Nevertheless, these approaches typically employ the entire set of open-set data during their training process, which may contain data unfriendly to the OSSL task that can negatively influence the model performance. This inspires us to develop a robust open-set data selection strategy for OSSL. Through a theoretical understanding from the perspective of learning theory, we propose Wise Open-set Semi-supervised Learning (WiseOpen), a generic OSSL framework that selectively leverages the open-set data for training the model. By applying a gradient-variance-based selection mechanism, WiseOpen exploits a friendly subset instead of the whole open-set dataset to enhance the model's capability of ID classification. Moreover, to reduce the computational expense, we also propose two practical variants of WiseOpen by adopting low-frequency update and loss-based selection respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of WiseOpen in comparison with the state-of-the-art.
Erasing the Bias: Fine-Tuning Foundation Models for Semi-Supervised Learning
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has witnessed remarkable progress, resulting in the emergence of numerous method variations. However, practitioners often encounter challenges when attempting to deploy these methods due to their subpar performance. In this paper, we present a novel SSL approach named FineSSL that significantly addresses this limitation by adapting pre-trained foundation models. We identify the aggregated biases and cognitive deviation problems inherent in foundation models, and propose a simple yet effective solution by imposing balanced margin softmax and decoupled label smoothing. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that FineSSL sets a new state of the art for SSL on multiple benchmark datasets, reduces the training cost by over six times, and can seamlessly integrate various fine-tuning and modern SSL algorithms. The source code is available at https://github.com/Gank0078/FineSSL.
Reproducibility Study of CDUL: CLIP-Driven Unsupervised Learning for Multi-Label Image Classification
This report is a reproducibility study of the paper "CDUL: CLIP-Driven Unsupervised Learning for Multi-Label Image Classification" (Abdelfattah et al, ICCV 2023). Our report makes the following contributions: (1) We provide a reproducible, well commented and open-sourced code implementation for the entire method specified in the original paper. (2) We try to verify the effectiveness of the novel aggregation strategy which uses the CLIP model to initialize the pseudo labels for the subsequent unsupervised multi-label image classification task. (3) We try to verify the effectiveness of the gradient-alignment training method specified in the original paper, which is used to update the network parameters and pseudo labels. The code can be found at https://github.com/cs-mshah/CDUL
Community-Invariant Graph Contrastive Learning
Tan, Shiyin, Li, Dongyuan, Jiang, Renhe, Zhang, Ying, Okumura, Manabu
Graph augmentation has received great attention in recent years for graph contrastive learning (GCL) to learn well-generalized node/graph representations. However, mainstream GCL methods often favor randomly disrupting graphs for augmentation, which shows limited generalization and inevitably leads to the corruption of high-level graph information, i.e., the graph community. Moreover, current knowledge-based graph augmentation methods can only focus on either topology or node features, causing the model to lack robustness against various types of noise. To address these limitations, this research investigated the role of the graph community in graph augmentation and figured out its crucial advantage for learnable graph augmentation. Based on our observations, we propose a community-invariant GCL framework to maintain graph community structure during learnable graph augmentation. By maximizing the spectral changes, this framework unifies the constraints of both topology and feature augmentation, enhancing the model's robustness. Empirical evidence on 21 benchmark datasets demonstrates the exclusive merits of our framework. Code is released on Github (https://github.com/ShiyinTan/CI-GCL.git).
Reinforcement Learning-Guided Semi-Supervised Learning
Heidari, Marzi, Zhang, Hanping, Guo, Yuhong
In recent years, semi-supervised learning (SSL) has gained significant attention due to its ability to leverage both labeled and unlabeled data to improve model performance, especially when labeled data is scarce. However, most current SSL methods rely on heuristics or predefined rules for generating pseudo-labels and leveraging unlabeled data. They are limited to exploiting loss functions and regularization methods within the standard norm. In this paper, we propose a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL) Guided SSL method, RLGSSL, that formulates SSL as a one-armed bandit problem and deploys an innovative RL loss based on weighted reward to adaptively guide the learning process of the prediction model. RLGSSL incorporates a carefully designed reward function that balances the use of labeled and unlabeled data to enhance generalization performance. A semi-supervised teacher-student framework is further deployed to increase the learning stability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RLGSSL through extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets and show that our approach achieves consistent superior performance compared to state-of-the-art SSL methods.
Robust Semi-supervised Learning via $f$-Divergence and $\alpha$-R\'enyi Divergence
Aminian, Gholamali, Bagheri, Amirhossien, JafariNodeh, Mahyar, Karimian, Radmehr, Yassaee, Mohammad-Hossein
This paper investigates a range of empirical risk functions and regularization methods suitable for self-training methods in semi-supervised learning. These approaches draw inspiration from various divergence measures, such as $f$-divergences and $\alpha$-R\'enyi divergences. Inspired by the theoretical foundations rooted in divergences, i.e., $f$-divergences and $\alpha$-R\'enyi divergence, we also provide valuable insights to enhance the understanding of our empirical risk functions and regularization techniques. In the pseudo-labeling and entropy minimization techniques as self-training methods for effective semi-supervised learning, the self-training process has some inherent mismatch between the true label and pseudo-label (noisy pseudo-labels) and some of our empirical risk functions are robust, concerning noisy pseudo-labels. Under some conditions, our empirical risk functions demonstrate better performance when compared to traditional self-training methods.