Density-Aware Graph for Deep Semi-Supervised Visual Recognition

Suichan Li, Bin Liu, Dongdong Chen, Qi Chu, Lu Yuan, Nenghai Yu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 13400-13409

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has been extensively studied to improve the generalization ability of deep neural networks for visual recognition. To involve the unlabelled data, most existing SSL methods are based on common density-based cluster assumption: samples lying in the same high-density region are likely to belong to the same class, including the methods performing consistency regularization or generating pseudo-labels for the unlabelled images. Despite their impressive performance, we argue three limitations exist: 1) Though the density information is demonstrated to be an important clue, they all use it in an implicit way and have not exploited it in depth. 2) For feature learning, they often learn the feature embedding based on the single data sample and ignore the neighborhood information. 3) For label-propagation based pseudo-label generation, it is often done offline and difficult to be end-to-end trained with feature learning. Motivated by these limitations, this paper proposes to solve the SSL problem by building a novel density-aware graph, based on which the neighborhood information can be easily leveraged and the feature learning and label propagation can also be trained in an end-to-end way. Specifically, we first propose a new Density-aware Neighborhood Aggregation(DNA) module to learn more discriminative features by incorporating the neighborhood information in a density-aware manner. Then a novel Density-ascending Path based Label Propagation(DPLP) module is proposed to generate the pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples more efficiently according to the feature distribution characterized by density. Finally, the DNA module and DPLP module evolve and improve each other end-to-end. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the newly proposed density-aware graph based SSL framework and our approach can outperform current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.