Harnessing unlabeled data for improving generalization of deep learning methods

Abstract

Recent advancements in Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Computer Vision have reached a critical stage, enabling researchers to explore the automatic extraction of individual demographic traits, known as soft-biometrics. This research aims to leverage unlabeled data in predicting soft-biometric traits, such as gender and age, using deep learning models. The objective is to develop a model that can accurately classify these traits by utilizing semi-supervised methods that rely on a limited amount of labeled data and a vast amount of unlabeled data. While unlabeled data may initially seem devoid of crucial information, this thesis explores how it can be effectively used to enhance classification accuracy, especially in scenarios where labeled data is scarce. This study evaluated the accuracy of different image classification models on the Celeb-A and NIR-VIS datasets using co-training, mix-up procedure, knowledge distillation, and blind distillation techniques. The results showed that incorporating these methods led to improvements in accuracy across both datasets and various attributes such as gender classification and smiling classification. Exploring the combined use of different techniques and investigating their synergistic effects could lead to further accuracy improvements. Evaluating the models on larger and more diverse datasets, analyzing their generalization capabilities, optimizing hyperparameters and architectures, and applying the techniques to other computer vision tasks were also identified as areas for future research.