# Semi-supervised learning made simple with self-supervised clustering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07483 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07483/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00362/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [mathbbX-Sample Contrastive Loss: Improving Contrastive Learning with Sample Similarity Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18134/) (2024)
- [A Survey of the Self Supervised Learning Mechanisms for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17059/) (2024)
- [Toulouse Hyperspectral Data Set: a benchmark data set to assess semi-supervised spectral representation learning and pixel-wise classification techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08863/) (2023)
- [Self-Reinforcing Prototype Evolution with Dual-Knowledge Cooperation for Semi-Supervised Lifelong Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01884/) (2025)
- [MM-DINOv2: Adapting Foundation Models for Multi-Modal Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06617/) (2025)
- [Center-Based Relaxed Learning Against Membership Inference Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17674/) (2024)
- [TRiCo: Triadic Game-Theoretic Co-Training for Robust Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21526/) (2025)
- [RankMatch: A Novel Approach to Semi-Supervised Label Distribution Learning Leveraging Inter-label Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06343/) (2023)
- [K*-Means: A Parameter-free Clustering Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11904/) (2025)
- [A Hidden Stumbling Block in Generalized Category Discovery: Distracted Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14315/) (2025)
- [Is user feedback always informative? Retrieval Latent Defending for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15383/) (2024)
- [A Unified Contrastive Loss for Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07292/) (2024)
- [Towards Multimodal Domain Generalization with Few Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22917/) (2026)
- [Cross-Level Multi-Instance Distillation for Self-Supervised Fine-Grained Visual Categorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08860/) (2024)
- [A Method of Moments Embedding Constraint and its Application to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17978/) (2024)
- [AnomalyAID: Reliable Interpretation for Semi-supervised Network Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11293/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning: Distribution Mismatch and Inductive Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20829/) (2024)
- [Learning Unlabeled Clients Divergence for Federated Semi-Supervised Learning via Anchor Model Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10327/) (2024)
- [Learn Faster and Remember More: Balancing Exploration and Exploitation for Continual Test-time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12643/) (2025)
- [JEPAMatch: Geometric Representation Shaping for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21046/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised learning models have been shown to learn rich visual representations without requiring human annotations. However, in many real-world scenarios, labels are partially available, motivating a recent line of work on semi-supervised methods inspired by self-supervised principles. In this paper, we propose a conceptually simple yet empirically powerful approach to turn clustering-based self-supervised methods such as SwAV or DINO into semi-supervised learners. More precisely, we introduce a multi-task framework merging a supervised objective using ground-truth labels and a self-supervised objective relying on clustering assignments with a single cross-entropy loss. This approach may be interpreted as imposing the cluster centroids to be class prototypes. Despite its simplicity, we provide empirical evidence that our approach is highly effective and achieves state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR100 and ImageNet.