Semi-Supervised Learning via Swapped Prediction for Communication Signal Recognition

Abstract: Deep neural networks have been widely used in communication signal recognition and achieved remarkable performance, but this superiority typically depends on using massive examples for supervised learning, whereas training a deep neural network on small datasets with few labels generally falls into overfitting, resulting in degenerated performance. To this end, we develop a semi-supervised learning (SSL) method that effectively utilizes a large collection of more readily available unlabeled signal data to improve generalization. The proposed method relies largely on a novel implementation of consistency-based regularization, termed Swapped Prediction, which leverages strong data augmentation to perturb an unlabeled sample and then encourage its corresponding model prediction to be close to its original, optimized with a scaled cross-entropy loss with swapped symmetry. Extensive experiments indicate that our proposed method can achieve a promising result for deep SSL of communication signal recognition.