OpenCoS: Contrastive Semi-supervised Learning for Handling Open-set Unlabeled Data

Modern semi-supervised learning methods conventionally assume both labeled and unlabeled data have the same class distribution. However, unlabeled data may include out-of-class samples in practice; those that cannot have one-hot encoded labels from a closed-set of classes in label data, i.e., unlabeled data is an open-set. In this paper, we introduce OpenCoS, a method for handling this realistic semi-supervised learning scenario based on a recent framework of contrastive learning. One of our key findings is that out-of-class samples in the unlabeled dataset can be identified effectively via (unsupervised) contrastive learning. OpenCoS utilizes this information to overcome the failure modes in the existing state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods, e.g., ReMixMatch or FixMatch. It further improves the semi-supervised performance by utilizing soft- and pseudo-labels on open-set unlabeled data, learned from contrastive learning. Our extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of OpenCoS, fixing the state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods to be suitable for diverse scenarios involving open-set unlabeled data.