Debiased Learning From Naturally Imbalanced Pseudo-Labels

Xudong Wang, Zhirong Wu, Long Lian, Stella X. Yu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 14647-14657

This work studies the bias issue of pseudo-labeling, a natural phenomenon that widely occurs but often overlooked by prior research. Pseudo-labels are generated when a classifier trained on source data is transferred to unlabeled target data. We observe heavy long-tailed pseudo-labels when a semi-supervised learning model FixMatch predicts labels on the unlabeled set even though the unlabeled data is curated to be balanced. Without intervention, the training model inherits the bias from the pseudo-labels and end up being sub-optimal. To eliminate the model bias, we propose a simple yet effective method DebiasMatch, comprising of an adaptive debiasing module and an adaptive marginal loss. The strength of debiasing and the size of margins can be automatically adjusted by making use of an online updated queue. Benchmarked on ImageNet-1K, DebiasMatch significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-arts by more than 26% and 10.5% on semi-supervised learning (0.2% annotated data) and zero-shot learning tasks respectively.