# Barely-Supervised Learning: Semi-Supervised Learning with very few labeled images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.12004 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12004/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (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)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [Measuring Calibration in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01685/) (2019)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [ReMixMatch: Semi-Supervised Learning with Distribution Alignment and Augmentation Anchoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09785/) (2019)
- [S4L: Self-Supervised Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03670/) (2019)
- [Discriminative Unsupervised Feature Learning with Exemplar Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.6909/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning with Ladder Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.02672/) (2015)
- [Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4864/) (2014)
- [CoMatch: Semi-supervised Learning with Contrastive Graph Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11183/) (2020)
- [Demystifying Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning: Invariances, Augmentations and Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13916/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Masked Siamese Networks for Label-Efficient Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07141/) (2022)
- [ConMatch: Semi-Supervised Learning with Confidence-Guided Consistency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08631/) (2022)
- [ProtoCon: Pseudo-label Refinement via Online Clustering and Prototypical Consistency for Efficient Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13556/) (2023)
- [Compete to Win: Enhancing Pseudo Labels for Barely-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07519/) (2023)
- [Hypergraph-enhanced Dual Semi-supervised Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04773/) (2024)
- [Class-Imbalanced Complementary-Label Learning via Weighted Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14189/) (2022)
- [Flexible Distribution Alignment: Towards Long-tailed Semi-supervised Learning with Proper Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04621/) (2023)
- [Can semi-supervised learning use all the data effectively? A lower bound perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18557/) (2023)
- [Active Self-Semi-Supervised Learning for Few Labeled Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04560/) (2022)
- [Learning from Reduced Labels for Long-Tailed Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16469/) (2024)
- [Investigating Self-Supervised Methods for Label-Efficient Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17460/) (2024)
- [Learning from Stochastic Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00299/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Barely-Supervised Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation from an Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09777/) (2024)
- [Semi-Supervised Audio-Visual Video Action Recognition with Audio Source Localization Guided Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02284/) (2025)
- [SynMatch: Rethinking Consistency in Medical Image Segmentation with Sparse Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07298/) (2025)
- [Learning from Uncertain Similarity and Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11984/) (2025)
- [Follow the Geometry, Not the Model: Cold Start Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14451/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper tackles the problem of semi-supervised learning when the set of labeled samples is limited to a small number of images per class, typically less than 10, problem that we refer to as barely-supervised learning. We analyze in depth the behavior of a state-of-the-art semi-supervised method, FixMatch, which relies on a weakly-augmented version of an image to obtain supervision signal for a more strongly-augmented version. We show that it frequently fails in barely-supervised scenarios, due to a lack of training signal when no pseudo-label can be predicted with high confidence. We propose a method to leverage self-supervised methods that provides training signal in the absence of confident pseudo-labels. We then propose two methods to refine the pseudo-label selection process which lead to further improvements. The first one relies on a per-sample history of the model predictions, akin to a voting scheme. The second iteratively updates class-dependent confidence thresholds to better explore classes that are under-represented in the pseudo-labels. Our experiments show that our approach performs significantly better on STL-10 in the barely-supervised regime, e.g. with 4 or 8 labeled images per class.