Recently proposed consistency-based Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods such as the $\Pi$-model, temporal ensembling, the mean teacher, or the virtual adversarial training, have advanced the state of the art in several SSL tasks. These methods can typically reach performances that are comparable to their fully supervised counterparts while using only a fraction of labelled examples. Despite these methodological advances, the understanding of these methods is still relatively limited. In this text, we analyse (variations of) the $\Pi$-model in settings where analytically tractable results can be obtained. We establish links with Manifold Tangent Classifiers and demonstrate that the quality of the perturbations is key to obtaining reasonable SSL performances. Importantly, we propose a simple extension of the Hidden Manifold Model that naturally incorporates data-augmentation schemes and offers a framework for understanding and experimenting with SSL methods.
While recent studies on semi-supervised learning have shown remarkable progress in leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data, most of them presume a basic setting of the model is randomly initialized. In this work, we consider semi-supervised learning and transfer learning jointly, leading to a more practical and competitive paradigm that can utilize both powerful pre-trained models from source domain as well as labeled/unlabeled data in the target domain. To better exploit the value of both pre-trained weights and unlabeled target examples, we introduce adaptive consistency regularization that consists of two complementary components: Adaptive Knowledge Consistency (AKC) on the examples between the source and target model, and Adaptive Representation Consistency (ARC) on the target model between labeled and unlabeled examples. Examples involved in the consistency regularization are adaptively selected according to their potential contributions to the target task. We conduct extensive experiments on several popular benchmarks including CUB-200-2011, MIT Indoor-67, MURA, by fine-tuning the ImageNet pre-trained ResNet-50 model. Results show that our proposed adaptive consistency regularization outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning techniques such as Pseudo Label, Mean Teacher, and MixMatch. Moreover, our algorithm is orthogonal to existing methods and thus able to gain additional improvements on top of MixMatch and FixMatch. Our code is available at //github.com/SHI-Labs/Semi-Supervised-Transfer-Learning.
Deep learning-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms have led to promising results in medical images segmentation and can alleviate doctors' expensive annotations by leveraging unlabeled data. However, most of the existing SSL algorithms in literature tend to regularize the model training by perturbing networks and/or data. Observing that multi/dual-task learning attends to various levels of information which have inherent prediction perturbation, we ask the question in this work: can we explicitly build task-level regularization rather than implicitly constructing networks- and/or data-level perturbation-and-transformation for SSL? To answer this question, we propose a novel dual-task-consistency semi-supervised framework for the first time. Concretely, we use a dual-task deep network that jointly predicts a pixel-wise segmentation map and a geometry-aware level set representation of the target. The level set representation is converted to an approximated segmentation map through a differentiable task transform layer. Simultaneously, we introduce a dual-task consistency regularization between the level set-derived segmentation maps and directly predicted segmentation maps for both labeled and unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that our method can largely improve the performance by incorporating the unlabeled data. Meanwhile, our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods. Code is available at: //github.com/Luoxd1996/DTC
Modern neural network training relies heavily on data augmentation for improved generalization. After the initial success of label-preserving augmentations, there has been a recent surge of interest in label-perturbing approaches, which combine features and labels across training samples to smooth the learned decision surface. In this paper, we propose a new augmentation method that leverages the first and second moments extracted and re-injected by feature normalization. We replace the moments of the learned features of one training image by those of another, and also interpolate the target labels. As our approach is fast, operates entirely in feature space, and mixes different signals than prior methods, one can effectively combine it with existing augmentation methods. We demonstrate its efficacy across benchmark data sets in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing, where it consistently improves the generalization performance of highly competitive baseline networks.
Despite much success, deep learning generally does not perform well with small labeled training sets. In these scenarios, data augmentation has shown much promise in alleviating the need for more labeled data, but it so far has mostly been applied in supervised settings and achieved limited gains. In this work, we propose to apply data augmentation to unlabeled data in a semi-supervised learning setting. Our method, named Unsupervised Data Augmentation or UDA, encourages the model predictions to be consistent between an unlabeled example and an augmented unlabeled example. Unlike previous methods that use random noise such as Gaussian noise or dropout noise, UDA has a small twist in that it makes use of harder and more realistic noise generated by state-of-the-art data augmentation methods. This small twist leads to substantial improvements on six language tasks and three vision tasks even when the labeled set is extremely small. For example, on the IMDb text classification dataset, with only 20 labeled examples, UDA achieves an error rate of 4.20, outperforming the state-of-the-art model trained on 25,000 labeled examples. On standard semi-supervised learning benchmarks CIFAR-10 and SVHN, UDA outperforms all previous approaches and achieves an error rate of 2.7% on CIFAR-10 with only 4,000 examples and an error rate of 2.85% on SVHN with only 250 examples, nearly matching the performance of models trained on the full sets which are one or two orders of magnitude larger. UDA also works well on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet. When trained with 10% of the labeled set, UDA improves the top-1/top-5 accuracy from 55.1/77.3% to 68.7/88.5%. For the full ImageNet with 1.3M extra unlabeled data, UDA further pushes the performance from 78.3/94.4% to 79.0/94.5%.
3D image segmentation plays an important role in biomedical image analysis. Many 2D and 3D deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art segmentation performance on 3D biomedical image datasets. Yet, 2D and 3D models have their own strengths and weaknesses, and by unifying them together, one may be able to achieve more accurate results. In this paper, we propose a new ensemble learning framework for 3D biomedical image segmentation that combines the merits of 2D and 3D models. First, we develop a fully convolutional network based meta-learner to learn how to improve the results from 2D and 3D models (base-learners). Then, to minimize over-fitting for our sophisticated meta-learner, we devise a new training method that uses the results of the base-learners as multiple versions of "ground truths". Furthermore, since our new meta-learner training scheme does not depend on manual annotation, it can utilize abundant unlabeled 3D image data to further improve the model. Extensive experiments on two public datasets (the HVSMR 2016 Challenge dataset and the mouse piriform cortex dataset) show that our approach is effective under fully-supervised, semi-supervised, and transductive settings, and attains superior performance over state-of-the-art image segmentation methods.
Medical image segmentation requires consensus ground truth segmentations to be derived from multiple expert annotations. A novel approach is proposed that obtains consensus segmentations from experts using graph cuts (GC) and semi supervised learning (SSL). Popular approaches use iterative Expectation Maximization (EM) to estimate the final annotation and quantify annotator's performance. Such techniques pose the risk of getting trapped in local minima. We propose a self consistency (SC) score to quantify annotator consistency using low level image features. SSL is used to predict missing annotations by considering global features and local image consistency. The SC score also serves as the penalty cost in a second order Markov random field (MRF) cost function optimized using graph cuts to derive the final consensus label. Graph cut obtains a global maximum without an iterative procedure. Experimental results on synthetic images, real data of Crohn's disease patients and retinal images show our final segmentation to be accurate and more consistent than competing methods.
In multi-organ segmentation of abdominal CT scans, most existing fully supervised deep learning algorithms require lots of voxel-wise annotations, which are usually difficult, expensive, and slow to obtain. In comparison, massive unlabeled 3D CT volumes are usually easily accessible. Current mainstream works to address the semi-supervised biomedical image segmentation problem are mostly graph-based. By contrast, deep network based semi-supervised learning methods have not drawn much attention in this field. In this work, we propose Deep Multi-Planar Co-Training (DMPCT), whose contributions can be divided into two folds: 1) The deep model is learned in a co-training style which can mine consensus information from multiple planes like the sagittal, coronal, and axial planes; 2) Multi-planar fusion is applied to generate more reliable pseudo-labels, which alleviates the errors occurring in the pseudo-labels and thus can help to train better segmentation networks. Experiments are done on our newly collected large dataset with 100 unlabeled cases as well as 210 labeled cases where 16 anatomical structures are manually annotated by four radiologists and confirmed by a senior expert. The results suggest that DMPCT significantly outperforms the fully supervised method by more than 4% especially when only a small set of annotations is used.
We propose a novel locally adaptive learning estimator for enhancing the inter- and intra- discriminative capabilities of Deep Neural Networks, which can be used as improved loss layer for semantic image segmentation tasks. Most loss layers compute pixel-wise cost between feature maps and ground truths, ignoring spatial layouts and interactions between neighboring pixels with same object category, and thus networks cannot be effectively sensitive to intra-class connections. Stride by stride, our method firstly conducts adaptive pooling filter operating over predicted feature maps, aiming to merge predicted distributions over a small group of neighboring pixels with same category, and then it computes cost between the merged distribution vector and their category label. Such design can make groups of neighboring predictions from same category involved into estimations on predicting correctness with respect to their category, and hence train networks to be more sensitive to regional connections between adjacent pixels based on their categories. In the experiments on Pascal VOC 2012 segmentation datasets, the consistently improved results show that our proposed approach achieves better segmentation masks against previous counterparts.
Deep CNN-based object detection systems have achieved remarkable success on several large-scale object detection benchmarks. However, training such detectors requires a large number of labeled bounding boxes, which are more difficult to obtain than image-level annotations. Previous work addresses this issue by transforming image-level classifiers into object detectors. This is done by modeling the differences between the two on categories with both image-level and bounding box annotations, and transferring this information to convert classifiers to detectors for categories without bounding box annotations. We improve this previous work by incorporating knowledge about object similarities from visual and semantic domains during the transfer process. The intuition behind our proposed method is that visually and semantically similar categories should exhibit more common transferable properties than dissimilar categories, e.g. a better detector would result by transforming the differences between a dog classifier and a dog detector onto the cat class, than would by transforming from the violin class. Experimental results on the challenging ILSVRC2013 detection dataset demonstrate that each of our proposed object similarity based knowledge transfer methods outperforms the baseline methods. We found strong evidence that visual similarity and semantic relatedness are complementary for the task, and when combined notably improve detection, achieving state-of-the-art detection performance in a semi-supervised setting.
Recently popularized graph neural networks achieve the state-of-the-art accuracy on a number of standard benchmark datasets for graph-based semi-supervised learning, improving significantly over existing approaches. These architectures alternate between a propagation layer that aggregates the hidden states of the local neighborhood and a fully-connected layer. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that a linear model, that removes all the intermediate fully-connected layers, is still able to achieve a performance comparable to the state-of-the-art models. This significantly reduces the number of parameters, which is critical for semi-supervised learning where number of labeled examples are small. This in turn allows a room for designing more innovative propagation layers. Based on this insight, we propose a novel graph neural network that removes all the intermediate fully-connected layers, and replaces the propagation layers with attention mechanisms that respect the structure of the graph. The attention mechanism allows us to learn a dynamic and adaptive local summary of the neighborhood to achieve more accurate predictions. In a number of experiments on benchmark citation networks datasets, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms competing methods. By examining the attention weights among neighbors, we show that our model provides some interesting insights on how neighbors influence each other.