MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning
This work addresses the reliance on large labeled datasets for machine learning practitioners by improving semi-supervised learning, showing incremental advancements through integration of existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of semi-supervised learning by unifying existing approaches into MixMatch, which guesses low-entropy labels for augmented unlabeled data and mixes labeled and unlabeled data using MixUp, resulting in state-of-the-art performance such as reducing error rate from 38% to 11% on CIFAR-10 with 250 labels.
Semi-supervised learning has proven to be a powerful paradigm for leveraging unlabeled data to mitigate the reliance on large labeled datasets. In this work, we unify the current dominant approaches for semi-supervised learning to produce a new algorithm, MixMatch, that works by guessing low-entropy labels for data-augmented unlabeled examples and mixing labeled and unlabeled data using MixUp. We show that MixMatch obtains state-of-the-art results by a large margin across many datasets and labeled data amounts. For example, on CIFAR-10 with 250 labels, we reduce error rate by a factor of 4 (from 38% to 11%) and by a factor of 2 on STL-10. We also demonstrate how MixMatch can help achieve a dramatically better accuracy-privacy trade-off for differential privacy. Finally, we perform an ablation study to tease apart which components of MixMatch are most important for its success.