# An Empirical Study and Analysis on Open-Set Semi-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.08237 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08237/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09501/) (2018)
- [Deep Visual Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03601/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [Meta Pseudo Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10580/) (2020)
- [Transfusion: Understanding Transfer Learning for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07208/) (2019)
- [ReMixMatch: Semi-Supervised Learning with Distribution Alignment and Augmentation Anchoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09785/) (2019)
- [In Defense of Pseudo-Labeling: An Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-label Selection Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06329/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Detecting Corrupted Labels Without Training a Model to Predict](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06283/) (2021)
- [Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning: A Comprehensive Analysis Across Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13506/) (2024)
- [Fix-A-Step: Semi-supervised Learning from Uncurated Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11870/) (2022)
- [RoPAWS: Robust Semi-supervised Representation Learning from Uncurated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14483/) (2023)
- [Out-of-Distributed Semantic Pruning for Robust Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18158/) (2023)
- [Robust Semi-Supervised Learning for Histopathology Images through Self-Supervision Guided Out-of-Distribution Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09930/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pseudo-labeling (PL) and Data Augmentation-based Consistency Training (DACT) are two approaches widely used in Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods. These methods exhibit great power in many machine learning tasks by utilizing unlabeled data for efficient training. But in a more realistic setting (termed as open-set SSL), where unlabeled dataset contains out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, the traditional SSL methods suffer severe performance degradation. Recent approaches mitigate the negative influence of OOD samples by filtering them out from the unlabeled data. However, it is not clear whether directly removing the OOD samples is the best choice. Furthermore, why PL and DACT could perform differently in open-set SSL remains a mystery. In this paper, we thoroughly analyze various SSL methods (PL and DACT) on open-set SSL and discuss pros and cons of these two approaches separately. Based on our analysis, we propose Style Disturbance to improve traditional SSL methods on open-set SSL and experimentally show our approach can achieve state-of-the-art results on various datasets by utilizing OOD samples properly. We believe our study can bring new insights for SSL research.