Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning

A fundamental limitation of applying semi-supervised learning in real-world settings is the assumption that unlabeled test data contains only classes previously encountered in the labeled training data. However, this assumption rarely holds for data in-the-wild, where instances belonging to novel classes may appear at testing time. Here, we introduce a novel open-world semi-supervised learning setting that formalizes the notion that novel classes may appear in the unlabeled test data. In this novel setting, the goal is to solve the class distribution mismatch problem between labeled and unlabeled data, where at the test time every input instance either needs to be classified into one of the existing classes or a new unseen class needs to be initialized and the instance assigned to it. To tackle this challenging problem, we propose ORCA, an end-to-end approach that assigns instances to previously seen classes or forms novel classes by grouping similar instances without assuming any prior knowledge. The key idea in ORCA is to utilize uncertainty adaptive margin to circumvent the bias towards seen classes caused by learning seen classes faster than the novel classes. In this way, ORCA gradually increases the discriminability of the model during the training and reduces the gap between intra-class variance of seen with respect to novel classes. Extensive experiments on image classification datasets and a single-cell dataset demonstrate that ORCA consistently outperforms alternative baselines, achieving 25% improvement on seen and 96% improvement on novel classes of the ImageNet dataset.