Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has recently proven to be an effective paradigm for leveraging a huge amount of unlabeled data while mitigating the reliance on large labeled data. Conventional methods focused on extracting a pseudo label from individual unlabeled data sample and thus they mostly struggled to handle inaccurate or noisy pseudo labels, which degenerate performance. In this paper, we address this limitation with a novel SSL framework for aggregating pseudo labels, called AggMatch, which refines initial pseudo labels by using different confident instances. Specifically, we introduce an aggregation module for consistency regularization framework that aggregates the initial pseudo labels based on the similarity between the instances. To enlarge the aggregation candidates beyond the mini-batch, we present a class-balanced confidence-aware queue built with the momentum model, encouraging to provide more stable and consistent aggregation. We also propose a novel uncertainty-based confidence measure for the pseudo label by considering the consensus among multiple hypotheses with different subsets of the queue. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of AggMatch over the latest methods on standard benchmarks and provide extensive analyses.
In this paper, we propose a novel mutual consistency network (MC-Net+) to effectively exploit the unlabeled data for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. The MC-Net+ model is motivated by the observation that deep models trained with limited annotations are prone to output highly uncertain and easily mis-classified predictions in ambiguous regions (e.g., adhesive edges or thin branches) for medical image segmentation. Leveraging these region-level challenging samples can make the semi-supervised segmentation model training more effective. Therefore, our proposed MC-Net+ model consists of two new designs. First, the model contains one shared encoder and multiple slightly different decoders (i.e., using different up-sampling strategies). The statistical discrepancy of multiple decoders' outputs is computed to denote the model's uncertainty, which indicates the unlabeled hard regions. Second, we apply a novel mutual consistency constraint between one decoder's probability output and other decoders' soft pseudo labels. In this way, we minimize the discrepancy of multiple outputs (i.e., the model uncertainty) during training and force the model to generate invariant results in such challenging regions, aiming at capturing more useful features. We compared the segmentation results of our MC-Net+ with five state-of-the-art semi-supervised approaches on three public medical datasets. Extension experiments with two common semi-supervised settings demonstrate the superior performance of our model over other existing methods, which sets a new state of the art for semi-supervised medical image segmentation.
Establishing dense correspondences across semantically similar images is one of the challenging tasks due to the significant intra-class variations and background clutters. To solve these problems, numerous methods have been proposed, focused on learning feature extractor or cost aggregation independently, which yields sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for jointly learning feature extraction and cost aggregation for semantic correspondence. By exploiting the pseudo labels from each module, the networks consisting of feature extraction and cost aggregation modules are simultaneously learned in a boosting fashion. Moreover, to ignore unreliable pseudo labels, we present a confidence-aware contrastive loss function for learning the networks in a weakly-supervised manner. We demonstrate our competitive results on standard benchmarks for semantic correspondence.
Identifying breakdowns in ongoing dialogues helps to improve communication effectiveness. Most prior work on this topic relies on human annotated data and data augmentation to learn a classification model. While quality labeled dialogue data requires human annotation and is usually expensive to obtain, unlabeled data is easier to collect from various sources. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised teacher-student learning framework to tackle this task. We introduce two teachers which are trained on labeled data and perturbed labeled data respectively. We leverage unlabeled data to improve classification in student training where we employ two teachers to refine the labeling of unlabeled data through teacher-student learning in a bootstrapping manner. Through our proposed training approach, the student can achieve improvements over single-teacher performance. Experimental results on the Dialogue Breakdown Detection Challenge dataset DBDC5 and Learning to Identify Follow-Up Questions dataset LIF show that our approach outperforms all previous published approaches as well as other supervised and semi-supervised baseline methods.
Recently, federated learning has emerged as a promising approach for training a global model using data from multiple organizations without leaking their raw data. Nevertheless, directly applying federated learning to real-world tasks faces two challenges: (1) heterogeneity in the data among different organizations; and (2) data noises inside individual organizations. In this paper, we propose a general framework to solve the above two challenges simultaneously. Specifically, we propose using distributionally robust optimization to mitigate the negative effects caused by data heterogeneity paradigm to sample clients based on a learnable distribution at each iteration. Additionally, we observe that this optimization paradigm is easily affected by data noises inside local clients, which has a significant performance degradation in terms of global model prediction accuracy. To solve this problem, we propose to incorporate mixup techniques into the local training process of federated learning. We further provide comprehensive theoretical analysis including robustness analysis, convergence analysis, and generalization ability. Furthermore, we conduct empirical studies across different drug discovery tasks, such as ADMET property prediction and drug-target affinity prediction.
Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) aims to facilitate the training and deployment of object detectors with the help of a large amount of unlabeled data. Though various self-training based and consistency-regularization based SSOD methods have been proposed, most of them are anchor-based detectors, ignoring the fact that in many real-world applications anchor-free detectors are more demanded. In this paper, we intend to bridge this gap and propose a DenSe Learning (DSL) based anchor-free SSOD algorithm. Specifically, we achieve this goal by introducing several novel techniques, including an Adaptive Filtering strategy for assigning multi-level and accurate dense pixel-wise pseudo-labels, an Aggregated Teacher for producing stable and precise pseudo-labels, and an uncertainty-consistency-regularization term among scales and shuffled patches for improving the generalization capability of the detector. Extensive experiments are conducted on MS-COCO and PASCAL-VOC, and the results show that our proposed DSL method records new state-of-the-art SSOD performance, surpassing existing methods by a large margin. Codes can be found at \textcolor{blue}{//github.com/chenbinghui1/DSL}.
Few-shot learning (FSL) methods typically assume clean support sets with accurately labeled samples when training on novel classes. This assumption can often be unrealistic: support sets, no matter how small, can still include mislabeled samples. Robustness to label noise is therefore essential for FSL methods to be practical, but this problem surprisingly remains largely unexplored. To address mislabeled samples in FSL settings, we make several technical contributions. (1) We offer simple, yet effective, feature aggregation methods, improving the prototypes used by ProtoNet, a popular FSL technique. (2) We describe a novel Transformer model for Noisy Few-Shot Learning (TraNFS). TraNFS leverages a transformer's attention mechanism to weigh mislabeled versus correct samples. (3) Finally, we extensively test these methods on noisy versions of MiniImageNet and TieredImageNet. Our results show that TraNFS is on-par with leading FSL methods on clean support sets, yet outperforms them, by far, in the presence of label noise.
To date, most existing self-supervised learning methods are designed and optimized for image classification. These pre-trained models can be sub-optimal for dense prediction tasks due to the discrepancy between image-level prediction and pixel-level prediction. To fill this gap, we aim to design an effective, dense self-supervised learning method that directly works at the level of pixels (or local features) by taking into account the correspondence between local features. We present dense contrastive learning, which implements self-supervised learning by optimizing a pairwise contrastive (dis)similarity loss at the pixel level between two views of input images. Compared to the baseline method MoCo-v2, our method introduces negligible computation overhead (only <1% slower), but demonstrates consistently superior performance when transferring to downstream dense prediction tasks including object detection, semantic segmentation and instance segmentation; and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Specifically, over the strong MoCo-v2 baseline, our method achieves significant improvements of 2.0% AP on PASCAL VOC object detection, 1.1% AP on COCO object detection, 0.9% AP on COCO instance segmentation, 3.0% mIoU on PASCAL VOC semantic segmentation and 1.8% mIoU on Cityscapes semantic segmentation. Code is available at: //git.io/AdelaiDet
Object detectors usually achieve promising results with the supervision of complete instance annotations. However, their performance is far from satisfactory with sparse instance annotations. Most existing methods for sparsely annotated object detection either re-weight the loss of hard negative samples or convert the unlabeled instances into ignored regions to reduce the interference of false negatives. We argue that these strategies are insufficient since they can at most alleviate the negative effect caused by missing annotations. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective mechanism, called Co-mining, for sparsely annotated object detection. In our Co-mining, two branches of a Siamese network predict the pseudo-label sets for each other. To enhance multi-view learning and better mine unlabeled instances, the original image and corresponding augmented image are used as the inputs of two branches of the Siamese network, respectively. Co-mining can serve as a general training mechanism applied to most of modern object detectors. Experiments are performed on MS COCO dataset with three different sparsely annotated settings using two typical frameworks: anchor-based detector RetinaNet and anchor-free detector FCOS. Experimental results show that our Co-mining with RetinaNet achieves 1.4%~2.1% improvements compared with different baselines and surpasses existing methods under the same sparsely annotated setting.
This paper presents SimCLR: a simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. We simplify recently proposed contrastive self-supervised learning algorithms without requiring specialized architectures or a memory bank. In order to understand what enables the contrastive prediction tasks to learn useful representations, we systematically study the major components of our framework. We show that (1) composition of data augmentations plays a critical role in defining effective predictive tasks, (2) introducing a learnable nonlinear transformation between the representation and the contrastive loss substantially improves the quality of the learned representations, and (3) contrastive learning benefits from larger batch sizes and more training steps compared to supervised learning. By combining these findings, we are able to considerably outperform previous methods for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A linear classifier trained on self-supervised representations learned by SimCLR achieves 76.5% top-1 accuracy, which is a 7% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art, matching the performance of a supervised ResNet-50. When fine-tuned on only 1% of the labels, we achieve 85.8% top-5 accuracy, outperforming AlexNet with 100X fewer labels.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.