Universal Semi-Supervised Learning

Universal Semi-Supervised Learning (UniSSL) aims to solve the open-set problem where both the class distribution (i.e., class set) and feature distribution (i.e., feature domain) are different between labeled dataset and unlabeled dataset. Such a problem seriously hinders the realistic landing of classical SSL. Different from the existing SSL methods targeting at the open-set problem that only study one certain scenario of class distribution mismatch and ignore the feature distribution mismatch, we consider a more general case where a mismatch exists in both class and feature distribution. In this case, we propose a “Class-shAring data detection and Feature Adaptation” (CAFA) framework which requires no prior knowledge of the class relationship between the labeled dataset and unlabeled dataset. Particularly, CAFA utilizes a novel scoring strategy to detect the data in the shared class set. Then, it conducts domain adaptation to fully exploit the value of the detected class-sharing data for better semi-supervised consistency training. Exhaustive experiments on several benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our method in tackling open-set problems.