Semi-supervised learning (SSL) seeks to enhance task performance by training on both labeled and unlabeled data. Mainstream SSL image classification methods mostly optimize a loss that additively combines a supervised classification objective with a regularization term derived solely from unlabeled data. This formulation neglects the potential for interaction between labeled and unlabeled images. In this paper, we introduce InterLUDE, a new approach to enhance SSL made of two parts that each benefit from labeled-unlabeled interaction. The first part, embedding fusion, interpolates between labeled and unlabeled embeddings to improve representation learning. The second part is a new loss, grounded in the principle of consistency regularization, that aims to minimize discrepancies in the model's predictions between labeled versus unlabeled inputs. Experiments on standard closed-set SSL benchmarks and a medical SSL task with an uncurated unlabeled set show clear benefits to our approach. On the STL-10 dataset with only 40 labels, InterLUDE achieves 3.2% error rate, while the best previous method reports 14.9%.

Certain things blur the boundaries of reality. Like a phone that can only connect to one number. Like the number that phone dials, which is also listed as the phone number on the TripAdvisor page for Echo River in Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park. Like the prerecorded message that plays when you dial that number, which says, "If you don't remember dialing this number at all, press 5," before launching into facts that all sound like thinly veiled urban legends. Like a retrospective for an artist who seems to have never existed, or a community television broadcast that seems to end with a ghost in the machine. This web of ephemera, which extends from the world we live in to the one on the other side of the screen, would seem to be the work of a major company, like the alternate reality game that accompanied the release of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight and sent 11 million people all over the world in search of the Joker.

Kentucky Route Zero has won "game of the year" awards multiple times, was dubbed the "best musical of 2014," and has been called "the most important game of the decade"--and all this before it was finished. Over the past seven years, the three-person indie studio Cardboard Computer has released four episodic "acts" of its critically acclaimed game, along with four playable "interludes." Fans have eagerly awaited the fifth and final chapter, the one where maybe, just maybe, you will arrive at your destination. It's finally here, part of a new collected edition from Annapurna Interactive for PC and console. The menu takes the shape of a circle, each act arranged around it like numbers on a clock face.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, young directors who go by the joint film credit Daniels, are known for reality-warped miniatures--short films, music videos, commercials--that are eerie yet playful in mood. In their work, people jump into other people's bodies, Teddy bears dance to hard-core dubstep, rednecks shoot clothes from rifles onto fleeing nudists. Last year, their first feature-length project, "Swiss Army Man"--starring Daniel Radcliffe, who plays a flatulent talking corpse that befriends a castaway--premièred at Sundance, and left some viewers wondering if it was the strangest thing ever to be screened at the festival. The Times, deciding that the film was impossible to categorize, called it "weird and wonderful, disgusting and demented." Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that when the Daniels were notified by their production company, several years ago, that an Israeli indie pop star living in New York wanted to hire them to experiment with technology that could alter fundamental assumptions of moviemaking, they took the call. The musician was Yoni Bloch, arguably the first Internet sensation on Israel's music scene--a wispy, bespectacled songwriter from the Negev whose wry, angst-laden music went viral in the early aughts, leading to sold-out venues and a record deal. After breaking up with his girlfriend, in 2007, Bloch had hoped to win her back by thinking big. He made a melancholy concept album about their relationship, along with a companion film in the mode of "The Wall"--only to fall in love with the actress who played his ex. He had also thought up a more ambitious idea: an interactive song that listeners could shape as it played. But by the time he got around to writing it his hurt feelings had given way to more indeterminate sentiments, and the idea grew to become an interactive music video. The result, "I Can't Be Sad Anymore," which he and his band released online in 2010, opens with Bloch at a party in a Tel Aviv apartment. Standing on a balcony, he puts on headphones, then wanders among his friends, singing about his readiness to escape melancholy. He passes the headphones to others; whoever wears them sings, too. Viewers decide, by clicking on onscreen prompts, how the headphones are passed--altering, in real time, the song's vocals, orchestration, and emotional tone, while also following different micro-dramas. If you choose the drunk, the camera follows her as she races into the bathroom, to Bloch's words "I want to drink less / but be more drunk." Choose her friend instead, and the video leads to sports fans downing shots, with the lyrics "I want to work less / but for a greater cause."

Hollywood studios have struggled to contend with the increasingly fleeting attention spans of online consumers. But now Sony Pictures Entertainment thinks it may have found a way to better hold people's interest with online video – by letting them affect the outcome. Sony Pictures Entertainment is making a multimillion-dollar strategic investment in New York-based Interlude, a digital firm that helps production companies and advertisers make interactive videos to better target online audiences. As in video games, Interlude's videos allow viewers to control aspects of what they see on screen with the click of a button, bringing the choose-your-own adventure concept to traditional entertainment. In a promotional video for MTV's "Scream" series, for example, viewers choose what to do in a short home-invasion thriller by clicking on icons that appear in the corner of the screen.