# Weakly-supervised Generative Adversarial Networks for medical image classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.14605 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14605/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Conditional Image Synthesis With Auxiliary Classifier GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09585/) (2016)
- [Learning a Probabilistic Latent Space of Object Shapes via 3D Generative-Adversarial Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07584/) (2016)
- [Understanding Dimensional Collapse in Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09348/) (2021)
- [Meta Pseudo Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10580/) (2020)
- [SinGAN: Learning a Generative Model from a Single Natural Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01164/) (2019)
- [In Defense of Pseudo-Labeling: An Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-label Selection Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06329/) (2021)
- [Visual Object Networks: Image Generation with Disentangled 3D Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02725/) (2018)
- [The One Hundred Layers Tiramisu: Fully Convolutional DenseNets for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09326/) (2016)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01583/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Learning with Categorical Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06390/) (2015)
- [Good Semi-supervised Learning that Requires a Bad GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09783/) (2017)
- [Semantic Segmentation using Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08408/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly-supervised learning has become a popular technology in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel medical image classification algorithm, called Weakly-Supervised Generative Adversarial Networks (WSGAN), which only uses a small number of real images without labels to generate fake images or mask images to enlarge the sample size of the training set. First, we combine with MixMatch to generate pseudo labels for the fake images and unlabeled images to do the classification. Second, contrastive learning and self-attention mechanism are introduced into the proposed problem to enhance the classification accuracy. Third, the problem of mode collapse is well addressed by cyclic consistency loss. Finally, we design global and local classifiers to complement each other with the key information needed for classification. The experimental results on four medical image datasets show that WSGAN can obtain relatively high learning performance by using few labeled and unlabeled data. For example, the classification accuracy of WSGAN is 11% higher than that of the second-ranked MIXMATCH with 100 labeled images and 1000 unlabeled images on the OCT dataset. In addition, we also conduct ablation experiments to verify the effectiveness of our algorithm.