# Interpolation-based Contrastive Learning for Few-Label Semi-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.11915 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11915/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2022.

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

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (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)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning Scaling is Predictable, Empirically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00409/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Interpolation Consistency Training for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03825/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02410/) (2016)
- [CoMatch: Semi-supervised Learning with Contrastive Graph Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11183/) (2020)
- [Augmenting Data with Mixup for Sentence Classification: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08941/) (2019)
- [Deep Graph Clustering via Dual Correlation Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14772/) (2021)
- [Understanding and Improving Interpolation in Autoencoders via an Adversarial Regularizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07543/) (2018)
- [Between-class Learning for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10284/) (2017)
- [Mixed batches and symmetric discriminators for GAN training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07185/) (2018)
- [Robust Triple-Matrix-Recovery-Based Auto-Weighted Label Propagation for Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08678/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Cluster-guided Contrastive Graph Clustering Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01098/) (2023)
- [Simple Contrastive Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07865/) (2022)
- [Graph Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Contrastive Learning Networks with Augmented View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00535/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Deep Graph Clustering: Taxonomy, Challenge, Application, and Open Resource](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12875/) (2022)
- [CONVERT:Contrastive Graph Clustering with Reliable Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08963/) (2023)
- [Mixed Graph Contrastive Network for Semi-Supervised Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02796/) (2022)
- [DealMVC: Dual Contrastive Calibration for Multi-view Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09000/) (2023)
- [Reinforcement Graph Clustering with Unknown Cluster Number](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06827/) (2023)
- [Dual Test-time Training for Out-of-distribution Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15620/) (2024)
- [GraphLearner: Graph Node Clustering with Fully Learnable Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03559/) (2022)
- [One-step Multi-view Clustering with Diverse Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05437/) (2023)
- [Curve-Aware Gaussian Splatting for 3D Parametric Curve Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21401/) (2025)
- [TMac: Temporal Multi-Modal Graph Learning for Acoustic Event Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11845/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Learning of Hybrid Part-aware 3D Representations of 2D Gaussians and Superquadrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10789/) (2024)
- [Federated Deep Multi-View Clustering with Global Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13697/) (2023)
- [Asymmetric double-winged multi-view clustering network for exploring Diverse and Consistent Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00474/) (2023)
- [Automatically Identify and Rectify: Robust Deep Contrastive Multi-view Clustering in Noisy Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21387/) (2025)
- [GANN: Graph Alignment Neural Network for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07778/) (2023)
- [Semantic Positive Pairs for Enhancing Visual Representation Learning of Instance Discrimination Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16122/) (2023)
- [Leveraging unsupervised data and domain adaptation for deep regression in low-cost sensor calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00521/) (2022)
- [Generalized Deep Multi-view Clustering via Causal Learning with Partially Aligned Cross-view Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16022/) (2025)
- [Few-shot Novel Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08260/) (2025)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning under General Causal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22567/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has long been proved to be an effective technique to construct powerful models with limited labels. In the existing literature, consistency regularization-based methods, which force the perturbed samples to have similar predictions with the original ones have attracted much attention for their promising accuracy. However, we observe that, the performance of such methods decreases drastically when the labels get extremely limited, e.g., 2 or 3 labels for each category. Our empirical study finds that the main problem lies with the drifting of semantic information in the procedure of data augmentation. The problem can be alleviated when enough supervision is provided. However, when little guidance is available, the incorrect regularization would mislead the network and undermine the performance of the algorithm. To tackle the problem, we (1) propose an interpolation-based method to construct more reliable positive sample pairs; (2) design a novel contrastive loss to guide the embedding of the learned network to change linearly between samples so as to improve the discriminative capability of the network by enlarging the margin decision boundaries. Since no destructive regularization is introduced, the performance of our proposed algorithm is largely improved. Specifically, the proposed algorithm outperforms the second best algorithm (Comatch) with 5.3% by achieving 88.73% classification accuracy when only two labels are available for each class on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Moreover, we further prove the generality of the proposed method by improving the performance of the existing state-of-the-art algorithms considerably with our proposed strategy.