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Poster
Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners
Ting Chen · Simon Kornblith · Kevin Swersky · Mohammad Norouzi · Geoffrey E Hinton

Wed Dec 09 09:00 AM -- 11:00 AM (PST) @ Poster Session 3 #1011
in Poster Session 4 »
One paradigm for learning from few labeled examples while making best use of a large amount of unlabeled data is unsupervised pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning. Although this paradigm uses unlabeled data in a task-agnostic way, in contrast to common approaches to semi-supervised learning for computer vision, we show that it is surprisingly effective for semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A key ingredient of our approach is the use of big (deep and wide) networks during pretraining and fine-tuning. We find that, the fewer the labels, the more this approach (task-agnostic use of unlabeled data) benefits from a bigger network. After fine-tuning, the big network can be further improved and distilled into a much smaller one with little loss in classification accuracy by using the unlabeled examples for a second time, but in a task-specific way. The proposed semi-supervised learning algorithm can be summarized in three steps: unsupervised pretraining of a big ResNet model using SimCLRv2, supervised fine-tuning on a few labeled examples, and distillation with unlabeled examples for refining and transferring the task-specific knowledge. This procedure achieves 73.9% ImageNet top-1 accuracy with just 1% of the labels ($\le$13 labeled images per class) using ResNet-50, a 10X improvement in label efficiency over the previous state-of-the-art. With 10% of labels, ResNet-50 trained with our method achieves 77.5% top-1 accuracy, outperforming standard supervised training with all of the labels.

Author Information

Ting Chen (Google)
Simon Kornblith (Google Brain)
Kevin Swersky (Google)
Mohammad Norouzi (Google Brain)
Geoffrey E Hinton (Google & University of Toronto)

Geoffrey Hinton received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh in 1978 and spent five years as a faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon where he pioneered back-propagation, Boltzmann machines and distributed representations of words. In 1987 he became a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and moved to the University of Toronto. In 1998 he founded the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London, returning to the University of Toronto in 2001. His group at the University of Toronto then used deep learning to change the way speech recognition and object recognition are done. He currently splits his time between the University of Toronto and Google. In 2010 he received the NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal, Canada's top award in Science and Engineering.

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