Incremental Semi-Supervised Learning Through Optimal Transport

Semi-supervised learning has recently emerged as one of the most promising paradigms to mitigate the reliance of deep learning on huge amounts of labeled data, especially in learning tasks where it is costly to collect annotated data. This is best illustrated in medicine, where measurement require overpriced machinery and labels are the result of an expensive human assisted time-consuming analysis. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) aims to largely reduce the need for massive labeled datasets by allowing a model to leverage both labeled and unlabeled data. Among the many semi-supervised learning approaches, graph-based semi-supervised learning techniques are increasingly being studied due to their performance and to more and more real graph datasets. The problem is to predict all the unlabelled vertices in the graph based on only a small subset of vertices being observed. To date, a number of graph-based algorithms, in particular label propagation methods have been successfully applied to different fields, such as social network analysis [7][50][51][25], natural language processing [1][43][3], and image segmentation [47][10]. The performance of label propagation algorithms is often affected by the graph-construction method and the technique of inferring pseudo-labels.