Gradient-based Data Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Learning

Abstract: In semi-supervised learning (SSL), a technique called consistency regularization (CR) achieves high performance. It has been proved that the diversity of data used in CR is extremely important to obtain a model with high discrimination performance by CR. We propose a new data augmentation (Gradient-based Data Augmentation (GDA)) that is deterministically calculated from the image pixel value gradient of the posterior probability distribution that is the model output. We aim to secure effective data diversity for CR by utilizing three types of GDA. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that the mixup method for labeled data and unlabeled data is also effective in SSL. We propose an SSL method named MixGDA by combining various mixup methods and GDA. The discrimination performance achieved by MixGDA is evaluated against the 13-layer CNN that is used as standard in SSL research. As a result, for CIFAR-10 (4000 labels), MixGDA achieves the same level of performance as the best performance ever achieved. For SVHN (250 labels, 500 labels and 1000 labels) and CIFAR-100 (10000 labels), MixGDA achieves state-of-the-art performance.