Doubly-Robust Self-Training
Main Conference Track
Authors: Banghua Zhu, Mingyu Ding, Philip Jacobson, Ming Wu, Wei Zhan, Michael Jordan, Jiantao Jiao

Self-training is a well-established technique in semi-supervised learning, which leverages unlabeled data by generating pseudo-labels and incorporating them with a limited labeled dataset for training. The effectiveness of self-training heavily relies on the accuracy of these pseudo-labels. In this paper, we introduce doubly-robust self-training, an innovative semi-supervised algorithm that provably balances between two extremes. When pseudo-labels are entirely incorrect, our method reduces to a training process solely using labeled data. Conversely, when pseudo-labels are completely accurate, our method transforms into a training process utilizing all pseudo-labeled data and labeled data, thus increasing the effective sample size. Through empirical evaluations on both the ImageNet dataset for image classification and the nuScenes autonomous driving dataset for 3D object detection, we demonstrate the superiority of the doubly-robust loss over the self-training baseline.