# Cold PAWS: Unsupervised class discovery and addressing the cold-start problem for semi-supervised learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10071 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10071/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [SCAN: Learning to Classify Images without Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12320/) (2020)
- [PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07441/) (2019)
- [VinDr-CXR: An open dataset of chest X-rays with radiologist's annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15029/) (2020)
- [FreeMatch: Self-adaptive Thresholding for Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07246/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Active Learning and Human-in-the-Loop Deep Learning for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02923/) (2019)
- [Contrastive and Non-Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning Recover Global and Local Spectral Embedding Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11508/) (2022)
- [Intriguing Properties of Contrastive Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02803/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning of Visual Features by Non-Parametrically Predicting View Assignments with Support Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13963/) (2021)
- [DeepWeeds: A Multiclass Weed Species Image Dataset for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05726/) (2018)
- [Semi-supervised Vision Transformers at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05688/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Augmentation Module in Contrastive Learning: Learning Hierarchical Augmentation Invariance with Expanded Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00227/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Selective Labeling for More Effective Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03006/) (2021)
- [PT4AL: Using Self-Supervised Pretext Tasks for Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07459/) (2022)
- [On the Marginal Benefit of Active Learning: Does Self-Supervision Eat Its Cake?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08121/) (2020)
- [On Initial Pools for Deep Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14696/) (2020)
- [Extending Contrastive Learning to Unsupervised Coreset Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03574/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [LUCoS: Latent Unsupervised Context Selection for Tabular Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27254/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In many machine learning applications, labeling datasets can be an arduous and time-consuming task. Although research has shown that semi-supervised learning techniques can achieve high accuracy with very few labels within the field of computer vision, little attention has been given to how images within a dataset should be selected for labeling. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on well-established self-supervised learning, clustering, and manifold learning techniques that address this challenge of selecting an informative image subset to label in the first instance, which is known as the cold-start or unsupervised selective labelling problem. We test our approach using several publicly available datasets, namely CIFAR10, Imagenette, DeepWeeds, and EuroSAT, and observe improved performance with both supervised and semi-supervised learning strategies when our label selection strategy is used, in comparison to random sampling. We also obtain superior performance for the datasets considered with a much simpler approach compared to other methods in the literature.