SemiGPC: Distribution-Aware Label Refinement for Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning Using Gaussian Processes

Abstract

In this paper we introduce SemiGPC, a distribution-aware label refinement strategy based on Gaussian Processes where the predictions of the model are derived from the labels posterior distribution. Differently from other buffer-based semi-supervised methods such as Co-Match [17] and SimMatch [34], our SemiGPC includes a normalization term that addresses imbalances in the global data distribution while maintaining local sensitivity. This explicit control allows SemiGPC to be more robust to confirmation bias especially under class imbalance. We show that SemiGPC improves performance when paired with different Semi-Supervised methods such as FixMatch [23], ReMixMatch [4], SimMatch [34] and FreeMatch [32] and different pre-training strategies including MSN [2] and Dino [5]. We also show that SemiGPC achieves state of the art results under different degrees of class imbalance on standard CIFAR10-LT/CIFAR100-LT especially in the low data-regime. Using SemiGPC also results in about 2% avg. accuracy increase compared to a new competitive baseline on the more challenging benchmarks SemiAves, SemiCUB, SemiFungi [27] and Semi-iNat [26].