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This paper proposes a novel method of learning by predicting view assignments with support samples (PAWS). The method trains a model to minimize a consistency loss, which ensures that different views of the same unlabeled instance are assigned similar pseudo-labels. The pseudo-labels are generated non-parametrically, by comparing the representations of the image views to those of a set of randomly sampled labeled images. The distance between the view representations and labeled representations is used to provide a weighting over class labels, which we interpret as a soft pseudo-label. By non-parametrically incorporating labeled samples in this way, PAWS extends the distance-metric loss used in self-supervised methods such as BYOL and SwAV to the semi-supervised setting. Despite the simplicity of the approach, PAWS outperforms other semi-supervised methods across architectures, setting a new state-of-the-art for a ResNet-50 on ImageNet trained with either 10% or 1% of the labels, reaching 75.5% and 66.5% top-1 respectively. PAWS requires 4x to 12x less training than the previous best methods.
Unsupervised image representations have significantly reduced the gap with supervised pretraining, notably with the recent achievements of contrastive learning methods. These contrastive methods typically work online and rely on a large number of explicit pairwise feature comparisons, which is computationally challenging. In this paper, we propose an online algorithm, SwAV, that takes advantage of contrastive methods without requiring to compute pairwise comparisons. Specifically, our method simultaneously clusters the data while enforcing consistency between cluster assignments produced for different augmentations (or views) of the same image, instead of comparing features directly as in contrastive learning. Simply put, we use a swapped prediction mechanism where we predict the cluster assignment of a view from the representation of another view. Our method can be trained with large and small batches and can scale to unlimited amounts of data. Compared to previous contrastive methods, our method is more memory efficient since it does not require a large memory bank or a special momentum network. In addition, we also propose a new data augmentation strategy, multi-crop, that uses a mix of views with different resolutions in place of two full-resolution views, without increasing the memory or compute requirements much. We validate our findings by achieving 75.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with ResNet-50, as well as surpassing supervised pretraining on all the considered transfer tasks.
Floods wreak havoc throughout the world, causing billions of dollars in damages, and uprooting communities, ecosystems and economies. Accurate and robust flood detection including delineating open water flood areas and identifying flood levels can aid in disaster response and mitigation. However, estimating flood levels remotely is of essence as physical access to flooded areas is limited and the ability to deploy instruments in potential flood zones can be dangerous. Aligning flood extent mapping with local topography can provide a plan-of-action that the disaster response team can consider. Thus, remote flood level estimation via satellites like Sentinel-1 can prove to be remedial. The Emerging Techniques in Computational Intelligence (ETCI) competition on Flood Detection tasked participants with predicting flooded pixels after training with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images in a supervised setting. We use a cyclical approach involving two stages (1) training an ensemble model of multiple UNet architectures with available high and low confidence labeled data and, generating pseudo labels or low confidence labels on the entire unlabeled test dataset, and then, (2) filter out quality generated labels and, (3) combining the generated labels with the previously available high confidence labeled dataset. This assimilated dataset is used for the next round of training ensemble models. This cyclical process is repeated until the performance improvement plateaus. Additionally, we post process our results with Conditional Random Fields. Our approach sets the second highest score on the public hold-out test leaderboard for the ETCI competition with 0.7654 IoU. To the best of our knowledge we believe this is one of the first works to try out semi-supervised learning to improve flood segmentation models.
Recently, self-supervised learning methods like MoCo, SimCLR, BYOL and SwAV have reduced the gap with supervised methods. These results have been achieved in a control environment, that is the highly curated ImageNet dataset. However, the premise of self-supervised learning is that it can learn from any random image and from any unbounded dataset. In this work, we explore if self-supervision lives to its expectation by training large models on random, uncurated images with no supervision. Our final SElf-supERvised (SEER) model, a RegNetY with 1.3B parameters trained on 1B random images with 512 GPUs achieves 84.2% top-1 accuracy, surpassing the best self-supervised pretrained model by 1% and confirming that self-supervised learning works in a real world setting. Interestingly, we also observe that self-supervised models are good few-shot learners achieving 77.9% top-1 with access to only 10% of ImageNet. Code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/vissl
Propagating input uncertainty through non-linear Gaussian process (GP) mappings is intractable. This hinders the task of training GPs using uncertain and partially observed inputs. In this paper we refer to this task as semi-described learning. We then introduce a GP framework that solves both, the semi-described and the semi-supervised learning problems (where missing values occur in the outputs). Auto-regressive state space simulation is also recognised as a special case of semi-described learning. To achieve our goal we develop variational methods for handling semi-described inputs in GPs, and couple them with algorithms that allow for imputing the missing values while treating the uncertainty in a principled, Bayesian manner. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world data study the problems of iterative forecasting and regression/classification with missing values. The results suggest that the principled propagation of uncertainty stemming from our framework can significantly improve performance in these tasks.
Training deep networks with limited labeled data while achieving a strong generalization ability is key in the quest to reduce human annotation efforts. This is the goal of semi-supervised learning, which exploits more widely available unlabeled data to complement small labeled data sets. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for discriminative pixel-level tasks using a generative model of both images and labels. Concretely, we learn a generative adversarial network that captures the joint image-label distribution and is trained efficiently using a large set of unlabeled images supplemented with only few labeled ones. We build our architecture on top of StyleGAN2, augmented with a label synthesis branch. Image labeling at test time is achieved by first embedding the target image into the joint latent space via an encoder network and test-time optimization, and then generating the label from the inferred embedding. We evaluate our approach in two important domains: medical image segmentation and part-based face segmentation. We demonstrate strong in-domain performance compared to several baselines, and are the first to showcase extreme out-of-domain generalization, such as transferring from CT to MRI in medical imaging, and photographs of real faces to paintings, sculptures, and even cartoons and animal faces. Project Page: url{https://nv-tlabs.github.io/semanticGAN/}