# Transfer of Pretrained Model Weights Substantially Improves Semi-Supervised Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00788 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00788/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning with Ladder Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.02672/) (2015)
- [An open access repository of images on plant health to enable the development of mobile disease diagnostics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08060/) (2015)
- [Good Semi-supervised Learning that Requires a Bad GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09783/) (2017)
- [Auxiliary Deep Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05473/) (2016)
- [Improving the Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs: A Consistency Term and Its Dual Effect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01541/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural networks produce state-of-the-art results when trained on a large number of labeled examples but tend to overfit when small amounts of labeled examples are used for training. Creating a large number of labeled examples requires considerable resources, time, and effort. If labeling new data is not feasible, so-called semi-supervised learning can achieve better generalisation than purely supervised learning by employing unlabeled instances as well as labeled ones. The work presented in this paper is motivated by the observation that transfer learning provides the opportunity to potentially further improve performance by exploiting models pretrained on a similar domain. More specifically, we explore the use of transfer learning when performing semi-supervised learning using self-learning. The main contribution is an empirical evaluation of transfer learning using different combinations of similarity metric learning methods and label propagation algorithms in semi-supervised learning. We find that transfer learning always substantially improves the model's accuracy when few labeled examples are available, regardless of the type of loss used for training the neural network. This finding is obtained by performing extensive experiments on the SVHN, CIFAR10, and Plant Village image classification datasets and applying pretrained weights from Imagenet for transfer learning.