Temporal Self-Ensembling Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

This paper focuses on the problem of Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD). In the field of Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL), the Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework which consists of a teacher model and a student model is widely used to make good use of the unlabeled images. Given unlabeled images, the teacher is supposed to yield meaningful targets (e.g. well-posed logits) to regularize the training of the student. However, directly applying the KD framework in SSOD has the following obstacles. (1) Teacher and student predictions may be very close which limits the upper-bound of the student, and (2) the data imbalance dilemma caused by dense prediction from object detection hinders an efficient consistency regularization between the teacher and student. To solve these problems, we propose the Temporal Self-Ensembling Teacher (TSE-T) model on top of the KD framework. Differently from the conventional KD methods, we devise a temporally updated teacher model. First, our teacher model ensembles its temporal predictions for unlabeled images under varying perturbations. Second, our teacher model ensembles its temporal model weights by Exponential Moving Average (EMA) which allows it gradually learn from student. The above self-ensembling strategies collaboratively yield better teacher predictions for unblabeled images. Finally, we use focal loss to formulate the consistency regularization to handle the data imbalance problem. Evaluated on the widely used VOC and COCO benchmarks, our method has achieved 80.73% and 40.52% (mAP) on the VOC2007 test set and the COCO2012 test-dev set respectively, which outperforms the fully-supervised detector by 2.37% and 1.49%. Furthermore, our method sets the new state state of the art in SSOD on VOC benchmark which outperforms the baseline SSOD method by 1.44%. The source code of this work is publicly available at http://github.com/SYangDong/tse-t.