Improved Prototypical Semi-Supervised Learning with Foundation Models: Prototype Selection, Parametric vMF-SNE Pretraining and Multi-view Pseudolabelling

In this paper we present an improved approach to prototypical semi-supervised learning for computer vision, in the context of leveraging a frozen foundation model as the backbone of our neural network. As a general tool, we propose parametric von-Mises Fisher Stochastic Neighbour Embedding (vMF-SNE) to create mappings with neural networks between high-dimensional latent spaces that preserve local structure. This enables us to pretrain the projection head of our network using the high-quality embeddings of the foundation model with vMF-SNE. We also propose soft multi-view pseudolabels, where predictions across multiple views are combined to provide a more reliable supervision signal compared to a consistency or swapped assignment approach. We demonstrate that these ideas improve upon P}redicting View-Assignments with Support Samples (PAWS), a current state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning method, as well as Robust PAWS (RoPAWS), over a range of benchmarking datasets. We also introduce simple $k$-means prototype selection, a technique that provides superior performance to other unsupervised label selection approaches in this context. These changes improve upon PAWS by an average of +2.9% for CIFAR-10 and +5.7% for CIFAR-100 with four labels per class, and by +15.2% for DeepWeeds, a particularly challenging dataset for semi-supervised learning. We also achieve new state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised learning in this small label regime for CIFAR-10 - 95.8% (+0.7%) and CIFAR-100 - 76.6% (+12.0%).