Meta Pseudo Labels

Many training algorithms of a deep neural network can be interpreted as minimizing the cross entropy loss between the prediction made by the network and a target distribution. In supervised learning, this target distribution is typically the ground-truth one-hot vector. In semi-supervised learning, this target distribution is typically generated by a pre-trained teacher model to train the main network. In this work, instead of using such predefined target distributions, we show that learning to adjust the target distribution based on the learning state of the main network can lead to better performances. In particular, we propose an efficient meta-learning algorithm, which encourages the teacher to adjust the target distributions of training examples in the manner that improves the learning of the main network. The teacher is updated by policy gradients computed by evaluating the main network on a held-out validation set. Our experiments demonstrate substantial improvements over strong baselines and establish state-ofthe-art performance on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and ImageNet. For instance, with ResNets on small datasets, we achieve 96.1% on CIFAR-10 with 4,000 labeled examples and 73.9% top-1 on ImageNet with 10% examples. Meanwhile, with EfficientNet on full datasets plus extra unlabeled data, we attain 98.6% accuracy on CIFAR-10 and 86.9% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet.