Diverse Learner: Exploring Diverse Supervision for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

Abstract

Current state-of-the-art semi-supervised object detection methods (SSOD) typically adopt the teacher-student framework featured with pseudo labeling and Exponential Moving Average (EMA). Although the performance is desirable, many remaining issues still need to be resolved, for example: (1) the teacher updated by the student using EMA tends to lose its distinctiveness and hence generates similar predictions comparing with student and cause potential noise accumulation as the training proceeds; (2) the exploitation of pseudo labels still has much room for improvement. We present a diverse learner semi-supervised object detection framework to tackle these issues. Concretely, to maintain distinctiveness between teachers and students, our framework consists of two paired teacher-student models with diverse supervision strategy. In addition, we argue that the pseudo labels which are typically regarded as unreliable and obsoleted by many existing methods are of great value. A particular training strategy consisting of Multi-threshold Classification Loss (MTC) and Pseudo Label-Aware Erasing (PLAE) is hence designed to well explore the full set of all pseudo labels. Extensive experimental results show that our diverse teacher-student framework outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method on the MS-COCO dataset by 2.10%, 1.50% and 0.83% when training with only 1%, 5% and 10% labeled data, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Moreover, our approach also performs well with larger amount of data, e.g. using full COCO training set and 123K unlabeled images from COCO, reaching a new state-of-the-art performance of 44.86% mAP.