Billion-scale semi-supervised learning for state-of-the-art image and video classification

Accurate image and video classification is important for a wide range of computer vision applications, from identifying harmful content, to making products more accessible to the visually impaired, to helping people more easily buy and sell things on products like Marketplace. Facebook AI is developing alternative ways to train our AI systems so that we can do more with less labeled training data overall, and also deliver accurate results even when large, high-quality labeled data sets are simply not available. Today, we are sharing details on a versatile new model training technique that delivers state-of-the-art accuracy for image and video classification systems. This approach, which we call semi-weak supervision, is a new way to combine the merits of two different training methods: semi-supervised learning and weakly supervised learning. It opens the door the door to creating more accurate, efficient production classification models by using a teacher-student model training paradigm and billion-scale weakly supervised data sets.