Towards Unbiased Learning in Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation aims to learn from a limited amount of labeled data and a large volume of unlabeled data, which has witnessed impressive progress with the recent advancement of deep neural networks. However, existing methods tend to neglect the fact of class imbalance issues, leading to the Matthew effect, that is, the poorly calibrated model’s predictions can be biased towards the majority classes and away from minority classes with fewer samples. In this work, we analyze the Matthew effect present in previous methods that hinder model learning from a discriminative perspective. In light of this background, we integrate generative models into semi-supervised learning, taking advantage of their better class-imbalance tolerance. To this end, we propose DiffMatch to formulate the semi-supervised semantic segmentation task as a conditional discrete data generation problem to alleviate the Matthew effect of discriminative solutions from a generative perspective. Plus, to further reduce the risk of overfitting to the head classes and to increase coverage of the tail class distribution, we mathematically derive a debiased adjustment to adjust the conditional reverse probability towards unbiased predictions during each sampling step. Extensive experimental results across multiple benchmarks, especially in the most limited label scenarios with the most serious class imbalance issues, demonstrate that DiffMatch performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.