ReMixMatch: Semi-Supervised Learning with Distribution Alignment and Augmentation Anchoring

A BSTRACT We improve the recently-proposed "MixMatch" semi-supervised learning algorithm by introducing two new techniques: distribution alignment and augmentation anchoring. Distribution alignment encourages the marginal distribution of predictions on unlabeled data to be close to the marginal distribution of ground-truth labels. Augmentation anchoring feeds multiple strongly augmented versions of an input into the model and encourages each output to be close to the prediction for a weakly-augmented version of the same input. To produce strong augmentations, we propose a variant of AutoAugment which learns the augmentation policy while the model is being trained. Our new algorithm, dubbed ReMix-Match, is significantly more data-efficient than prior work, requiring between 5 and 16 less data to reach the same accuracy. For example, on CIFAR-10 with 250 labeled examples we reach 93 .73% This can enable the use of large, powerful models when labeling data is expensive or inconvenient. Research on SSL has produced a diverse collection of approaches, including consistency regularization (Sajjadi et al., 2016; Laine & Aila, 2017) which encourages a model to produce the same prediction when the input is perturbed and entropy minimization (Grandvalet & Bengio, 2005) which encourages the model to output high-confidence predictions. The recently proposed "MixMatch" algorithm (Berthelot et al., 2019) combines these techniques in a unified loss function and achieves strong performance on a variety of image classification benchmarks.