# Virtual Category Learning: A Semi-Supervised Learning Method for Dense Prediction with Extremely Limited Labels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.01169 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01169/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Convex optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01946/) (2021)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Trusted Multi-view Learning under Noisy Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11944/) (2024)
- [IDESplat: Iterative Depth Probability Estimation for Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03824/) (2026)
- [Unsupervised Pre-training with Language-Vision Prompts for Low-Data Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13388/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Evidence Decoupling for Trusted Multi-view Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03796/) (2024)
- [RSOD: Reliability-Guided Sonar Image Object Detection with Extremely Limited Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12715/) (2026)
- [CTFS : Collaborative Teacher Framework for Forward-Looking Sonar Image Semantic Segmentation with Extremely Limited Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21071/) (2026)
- [Learning Generalizable Features for Tibial Plateau Fracture Segmentation Using Masked Autoencoder and Limited Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02862/) (2025)
- [When Noise Meets Long-Tail: Feature-Threshold Dual Calibration for Robust Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33668/) (2026)
- [Virtual Category-Guided Continual Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04984/) (2026)
- [FU-Mamba: A Frequency-Enhanced Dynamic Scanning Framework for Oralscan Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26607/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to the costliness of labelled data in real-world applications, semi-supervised learning, underpinned by pseudo labelling, is an appealing solution. However, handling confusing samples is nontrivial: discarding valuable confusing samples would compromise the model generalisation while using them for training would exacerbate the issue of confirmation bias caused by the resulting inevitable mislabelling. To solve this problem, this paper proposes to use confusing samples proactively without label correction. Specifically, a Virtual Category (VC) is assigned to each confusing sample in such a way that it can safely contribute to the model optimisation even without a concrete label. This provides an upper bound for inter-class information sharing capacity, which eventually leads to a better embedding space. Extensive experiments on two mainstream dense prediction tasks -- semantic segmentation and object detection, demonstrate that the proposed VC learning significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art, especially when only very few labels are available. Our intriguing findings highlight the usage of VC learning in dense vision tasks.