Towards Understanding Why FixMatch Generalizes Better Than Supervised Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Jingyang, Pan, Jiachun, Tan, Vincent Y. F., Toh, Kim-Chuan, Zhou, Pan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Li, Jingyang
Pan, Jiachun
Tan, Vincent Y. F.
Toh, Kim-Chuan
Zhou, Pan
author_facet Li, Jingyang
Pan, Jiachun
Tan, Vincent Y. F.
Toh, Kim-Chuan
Zhou, Pan
contents Semi-supervised learning (SSL), exemplified by FixMatch (Sohn et al., 2020), has shown significant generalization advantages over supervised learning (SL), particularly in the context of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, it is still unclear, from a theoretical standpoint, why FixMatch-like SSL algorithms generalize better than SL on DNNs. In this work, we present the first theoretical justification for the enhanced test accuracy observed in FixMatch-like SSL applied to DNNs by taking convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on classification tasks as an example. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the semantic feature learning processes in FixMatch and SL are rather different. In particular, FixMatch learns all the discriminative features of each semantic class, while SL only randomly captures a subset of features due to the well-known lottery ticket hypothesis. Furthermore, we show that our analysis framework can be applied to other FixMatch-like SSL methods, e.g., FlexMatch, FreeMatch, Dash, and SoftMatch. Inspired by our theoretical analysis, we develop an improved variant of FixMatch, termed Semantic-Aware FixMatch (SA-FixMatch). Experimental results corroborate our theoretical findings and the enhanced generalization capability of SA-FixMatch.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_11206
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Understanding Why FixMatch Generalizes Better Than Supervised Learning
Li, Jingyang
Pan, Jiachun
Tan, Vincent Y. F.
Toh, Kim-Chuan
Zhou, Pan
Machine Learning
Semi-supervised learning (SSL), exemplified by FixMatch (Sohn et al., 2020), has shown significant generalization advantages over supervised learning (SL), particularly in the context of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, it is still unclear, from a theoretical standpoint, why FixMatch-like SSL algorithms generalize better than SL on DNNs. In this work, we present the first theoretical justification for the enhanced test accuracy observed in FixMatch-like SSL applied to DNNs by taking convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on classification tasks as an example. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the semantic feature learning processes in FixMatch and SL are rather different. In particular, FixMatch learns all the discriminative features of each semantic class, while SL only randomly captures a subset of features due to the well-known lottery ticket hypothesis. Furthermore, we show that our analysis framework can be applied to other FixMatch-like SSL methods, e.g., FlexMatch, FreeMatch, Dash, and SoftMatch. Inspired by our theoretical analysis, we develop an improved variant of FixMatch, termed Semantic-Aware FixMatch (SA-FixMatch). Experimental results corroborate our theoretical findings and the enhanced generalization capability of SA-FixMatch.
title Towards Understanding Why FixMatch Generalizes Better Than Supervised Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11206