Discover and Align Taxonomic Context Priors for Open-world Semi-Supervised Learning

Yu Wang, Zhun Zhong, Pengchong Qiao, Xuxin Cheng, Xiawu Zheng, Chang Liu, Nicu Sebe, Rongrong Ji, Jie Chen*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Open-world Semi-Supervised Learning (OSSL) is a realistic and challenging task, aiming to classify unlabeled samples from both seen and novel classes using partially labeled samples from the seen classes. Previous works typically explore the relationship of samples as priors on the pre-defined single-granularity labels to help novel class recognition. In fact, classes follow a taxonomy and samples can be classified at multiple levels of granularity, which contains more underlying relationships for supervision. We thus argue that learning with single-granularity labels results in sub-optimal representation learning and inaccurate pseudo labels, especially with unknown classes. In this paper, we take the initiative to explore and propose a uniformed framework, called Taxonomic context prIors Discovering and Aligning (TIDA), which exploits the relationship of samples under various granularity. It allows us to discover multi-granularity semantic concepts as taxonomic context priors (i.e., sub-class, target-class, and super-class), and then collaboratively leverage them to enhance representation learning and improve the quality of pseudo labels. Specifically, TIDA comprises two components: i) A taxonomic context discovery module that constructs a set of hierarchical prototypes in the latent space to discover the underlying taxonomic context priors; ii) A taxonomic context-based prediction alignment module that enforces consistency across hierarchical predictions to build the reliable relationship between classes among various granularity and provide additions supervision. We demonstrate that these two components are mutually beneficial for an effective OSSL framework, which is theoretically explained from the perspective of the EM algorithm. Extensive experiments on seven commonly used datasets show that TIDA can significantly improve the performance and achieve a new state of the art. The source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/rain305f/TIDA.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 - 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2023
EditorsA. Oh, T. Neumann, A. Globerson, K. Saenko, M. Hardt, S. Levine
PublisherNeural information processing systems foundation
ISBN (Electronic)9781713899921
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Externally publishedYes
Event37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2023 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: 10 Dec 202316 Dec 2023

Publication series

NameAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume36
ISSN (Print)1049-5258

Conference

Conference37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period10/12/2316/12/23

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