CoSSL: Co-Learning of Representation and Classifier for Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning

Abstract

Standard semi-supervised learning (SSL) using class-balanced datasets has shown great progress to leverage unlabeled data effectively. However, the more realistic setting of class-imbalanced data - called imbalanced SSL - is largely underexplored and standard SSL tends to underperform. In this paper, we propose a novel co-learning framework (CoSSL), which decouples representation and classifier learning while coupling them closely. To handle the data imbalance, we devise Tail-class Feature Enhancement (TFE) for classifier learning. Furthermore, the current evaluation protocol for imbalanced SSL focuses only on balanced test sets, which has limited practicality in real-world scenarios. Therefore, we further conduct a comprehensive evaluation under various shifted test distributions. In experiments, we show that our approach outperforms other methods over a large range of shifted distributions, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets ranging from CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, to Food-101. Our code will be made publicly available.