Partly Supervised Multitask Learning

Semi-supervised learning has recently been attracting attention as an alternative to fully supervised models that require large pools of labeled data. Moreover, optimizing a model for multiple tasks can provide better generalizability than single-task learning. Leveraging self-supervision and adversarial training, we propose a novel general purpose semi-supervised, multiple-task model---namely, self-supervised, semi-supervised, multitask learning (S4MTL)---for accomplishing two important tasks in medical imaging, segmentation and diagnostic classification. Experimental results on chest and spine X-ray datasets suggest that our S4MTL model significantly outperforms semi-supervised single task, semi/fully-supervised multitask, and fully-supervised single task models, even with a 50% reduction of class and segmentation labels. We hypothesize that our proposed model can be effective in tackling limited annotation problems for joint training, not only in medical imaging domains, but also for general-purpose vision tasks.