Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2022
CLASSIFY AND GENERATE RECIPROCALLY:
SIMULTANEOUS POSITIVE-UNLABELLED LEARNING
AND CONDITIONAL GENERATION WITH EXTRA DATA
Anonymous authors
Paper under double-blind review
ABSTRACT
The scarcity of class-labeled data is a ubiquitous bottleneck in a wide range of
machine learning problems. While abundant unlabeled data normally exist and
provide a potential solution, it is extremely challenging to exploit them. In this pa-
per, we address this problem by leveraging Positive-Unlabeled (PU) classification
and the conditional generation with extra unlabeled data simultaneously, both of
which aim to make full use of agnostic unlabeled data to improve classification and
generation performance. In particular, we present a novel training framework to
jointly target both PU classification and conditional generation when exposing to
extra data, especially out-of-distribution unlabeled data, by exploring the interplay
between them: 1) enhancing the performance of PU classifiers with the assistance
of a novel Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CGAN) that is robust to
noisy labels, 2) leveraging extra data with predicted labels from a PU classifier
to help the generation. Our key contribution is a Classifier-Noise-Invariant Con-
ditional GAN (CNI-CGAN) that can learn the clean data distribution from noisy
labels predicted by a PU classifier. Theoretically, we proved the optimal condi-
tion of CNI-CGAN and experimentally, we conducted extensive evaluations on
diverse datasets, verifying the simultaneous improvements on both classification
and generation.
1
INTRODUCTION
Existing machine learning methods, particularly deep learning models, typically require big data
to pursue remarkable performance. For instance, conditional deep generative models are able to
generate high-fidelity and diverse images, but they have to rely on vast amounts of labeled data (Lu-
cic et al., 2019). Nevertheless, it is often laborious or impractical to collect large-scale accurate
class-labeled data in real-world scenarios, and thus the label scarcity is ubiquitous. Under such cir-
cumstances, the performance of classification and conditional generation (Mirza & Osindero, 2014)
drops significantly (Lucic et al., 2019). At the same time, diverse unlabeled data are available in
enormous quantities, and therefore a key issue is how to take advantage of the extra data to enhance
the conditional generation or classification.
Within the unlabeled data, both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data exist, where in-
distribution data conform to the distribution of the labeled data while out-of-distribution data do
not. Our key insight is to harness the out-of-distribution data. In the generation with extra data,
most related works focused on the in-distribution data (Lucic et al., 2019; Gui et al., 2020; Donahue
& Simonyan, 2019). When it comes to the out-of-distribution data, the majority of existing meth-
ods (Noguchi & Harada, 2019; Yamaguchi et al., 2019; Zhao et al., 2020) attempted to forcibly train
generative models on a large amount of unlabeled data, and then transferred the learned knowledge
of the pre-trained generator to the in-distribution data. In classification, a common setting to utilize
unlabeled data is semi-supervised learning (Miyato et al., 2018; Sun et al., 2019; Berthelot et al.,
2019), which usually assumes that the unlabeled and labeled data come from the same distribution,
ignoring their distributional mismatch. In contrast, Positive and Unlabeled (PU) Learning (Bekker
& Davis, 2020; Kiryo et al., 2017) is an elegant way of handling this under-studied problem, where
a model has the only access to positive samples and unlabeled data. Therefore, it is possible to
utilize pseudo labels predicted by a PU classifier on unlabeled data to guide the conditional gen-
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Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2022
eration. However, the predicted signals from the classifier tend to be noisy. Although there are a
flurry of papers about learning from noisy labels for classification (Tsung Wei Tsai, 2019; Ge et al.,
2020; Guo et al., 2019), to our best knowledge, no work has considered to leverage the noisy labels
seamlessly in the joint classification and generation. Additionally, another work (Hou et al., 2018)
leveraged GANs to recover both positive and negative data distribution to step away from overfit-
ting, but they never considered the noise-invariant generation or their mutual improvement. The
generative-discriminative complementary learning (Xu et al., 2019) was investigated in weakly su-
pervised learning, but we are the first attempt to tackle the (Multi-) Positive and Unlabeled learning
setting while developing the method of noise-invariant generation from noisy labels. Please refer to
Section 5 for the discussion about more related works.
In this paper, we focus on the mutual benefits of conditional generation and PU classification,
when we are only accessible to little class-labeled data, but extra unlabeled data, including out-
of-distribution data, can be available. Firstly, a parallel non-negative multi-class PU estimator is
derived to classify both the positive data of all classes and the negative data. Then we design a
Classifier-Noise-Invariant Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CNI-CGAN) that is able to
learn the clean data distribution on all unlabeled data with noisy labels provided by the PU clas-
sifier. Simultaneously, we also leverage our CNI-CGAN to enhance the performance of the PU
classification through data augmentation, demonstrating a reciprocal benefit for both generation and
classification. We provide the theoretical analysis on the optimal condition of our CNI-CGAN and
conduct extensive experiments to verify the superiority of our approach.
2
OUR METHOD
2.1
POSITIVE-UNLABELED LEARNING
Traditional Binary Positive-Unlabeled Problem Setting Let X ∈Rd and Y ∈{±1} be the input
and output variables and p(x, y) is the joint distribution with marginal distribution pp(x) = p(x|Y =
+1) and pn(x) = p(x|Y = −1). In particular, we denote p(x) as the distribution of unlabeled data.
np, nn and nu are the amount of positive, negative and unlabeled data, respectively.
Parallel Non-Negative PU Estimator Vanilla PU learning (Bekker & Davis, 2020; Kiryo et al.,
2017; Du Plessis et al., 2014; 2015) employs unbiased and consistent estimator. Denote gθ : Rd →
R as the score function parameterized by θ, and ℓ: R × {±1} →R as the loss function. The risk of
gθ can be approximated by its empirical version denoted as b
Rpn(gθ):
b
Rpn(gθ) = πp b
R+
p (gθ) + πn b
R−
n (gθ),
(1)
where πp represents the class prior probability, i.e. πp = P(Y = +1) with πp+πn = 1. In addition,
b
R+
p (gθ) =
1
np
Pnp
i=1 ℓ(gθ (xp
i ) , +1) and b
R−
n (gθ) =
1
nn
Pnn
i=1 ℓ(gθ (xn
i ) , −1) .
As negative data xn are unavailable, a common strategy is to offset R−
n (gθ). We also know that
πnpn(x) = p(x) −πppp(x), and hence πn b
R−
n (gθ) = b
R−
u (gθ) −πp b
R−
p (gθ). Then the resulting
unbiased risk estimator b
Rpu(gθ) can be formulated as:
b
Rpu(gθ) = πp b
R+
p (gθ) −πp b
R−
p (gθ) + b
R−
u (gθ),
(2)
where b
R−
p (gθ) =
1
np
Pnp
i=1 ℓ(gθ (xp
i ) , −1) and b
R−
u (gθ) =
1
nu
Pnu
i=1 ℓ(gθ (xu
i ) , −1). The advan-
tage of this unbiased risk minimizer is that the optimal solution can be easily obtained if g is linear
in θ. However, in real scenarios we tend to leverage more flexible models gθ, e.g., deep neural
networks. This strategy will push the estimator to a point where it starts to suffer from overfit-
ting. Hence, we decide to utilize non-negative risk (Kiryo et al., 2017) for our PU learning, which
has been verified in (Kiryo et al., 2017) to allow deep neural network to mitigate overfitting. The
non-negative PU estimator is formulated as:
b
Rpu(gθ) = πp b
R+
p (gθ) + max
n
0, b
R−
u (gθ) −πp b
R−
p (gθ)
o
.
(3)
In pursue of the parallel implementation of b
Rpu(gθ), we replace max
n
0, b
R−
u (gθ) −πp b
R−
p (gθ)
o
with its lower bound 1
N
PN
i=1 max
n
0, b
R−
u (gθ; X i
u) −πp b
R−
p (gθ; X i
p)
o
where X i
u and X i
p denote as
the unlabeled and positive data in the i-th mini-batch, and N is the number of batches.
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From Binary PU to Multi-PU Learning Previous PU learning focuses on learning a classifier from
positive and unlabeled data, and cannot easily be adapted to K + 1 multi-classification tasks where
K represents the number of classes in the positive data. Multi-Positive and Unlabeled learning (Xu
et al., 2017) was ever developed, but the proposed algorithm may not allow deep neural networks.
Instead, we extend binary PU learning to multi-class version in a straightforward way by addition-
ally incorporating cross entropy loss on all the positive data with labels for different classes. More
precisely, we consider the K +1-class classifier fθ as a score function fθ =
f 1
θ (x), . . . , f K+1
θ
(x)


.
After the softmax function, we select the first K positive data to construct cross-entropy loss ℓCE,
i.e., ℓCE(fθ(x), y) = log PK+1
j=1 exp

f j
θ(x)

−f y
θ (x) where y ∈[K]. For the PU loss, we
consider the composite function h(fθ(x)) : Rd →R where h(·) conducts a logit transforma-
tion on the accumulative probability for the first K classes, i.e., h(fθ(x)) = ln(
p
1−p) in which
p = PK
j=1 exp

f j
θ(x)

/ PK+1
j=1 exp

f j
θ(x)

. The final mini-batch risk of our PU learning can be
presented as:
e
Rpu(fθ; X i) = πp b
R+
p (h(fθ); X i
p) + max
n
0, b
R−
u (h(fθ); X i
u) −πp b
R−
p (h(fθ); X i
p)
o
+ b
RCE
p (fθ; X i
p),
(4)
where b
RCE
p (fθ; X i
p) =
1
np
Pnp
i=1 ℓCE (fθ (xp
i ) , y).
2.2
CLASSIFIER-NOISE-INVARIANT CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL
NETWORK (CNI-CGAN)
୥
PU
௥
௥
PU
୥
Figure 1: Model architecture of our Classifier-
Noise-Invariant Conditional GAN (CNI-CGAN).
The output xg of the conditional generator G is
paired with a noisy label ˜
y corrupted by the PU-
dependent confusion matrix ˜
C. The discriminator
D distinguishes between whether a given labeled
sample comes from the real data (xr, PUθ(xr))
or generated data (xg, ˜
y).
To leverage extra data, i.e., all unlabeled data,
to benefit the generation, we deploy our condi-
tional generative model on all data with pseudo
labels predicted by our PU classifier. However,
these predicted labels tend to be noisy, reduc-
ing the reliability of the supervision signals and
thus worsening the performance of the condi-
tional generative model. Besides, the noise de-
pends on the accuracy of the given PU classi-
fier. To address this issue, we focus on devel-
oping a novel noise-invariant conditional GAN
that is robust to noisy labels provided by a spec-
ified classifier, e.g. a PU classifier. We call our
method Classifier-Noise-Invariant Conditional
Generative Adversarial Network (CNI-CGAN)
and the architecture is depicted in Figure 1. In
the following, we elaborate on each part of it.
Principle of the Design of CNI-CGAN
Albeit being noisy, the pseudo labels given by
the PU classifier still provide rich information
that we can exploit. The key is to take the noise
generation mechanism into consideration dur-
ing the generation.
We denote the real data
as xr and the predicted hard label through the
PU classifier as PUθ(xr), i.e., PUθ(xr) =
arg maxi f i
θ(xr), as displayed in Figure 1. We
let the generator “imitate” the noise generation
mechanism to generate pseudo labels for the labeled data. With both pseudo and real labels, we
can leverage the PU classifier fθ to estimate a confusion matrix ˜
C to model the label noise from
the classifier. During the generation, a real label y, while being fed into the generator G, will also
be polluted by ˜
C to compute a noisy label ˜
y, which then will be combined with the generated fake
sample xg for the following discrimination. Finally, the discriminator D will distinguish the real
samples [xr, PUθ(xr)] out of fake samples [xg, ˜
y]. Overall, the noise “generation” mechanism from
both sides can be balanced.
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Estimation of ˜
C The key in the design of ˜
C is to estimate the label noise of the pre-trained PU
classifier by considering all the samples of each class. More specifically, the confusion matrix ˜
C is
k + 1 by k + 1 and each entry ˜
Cij represents the probability of a generated sample xg, given a label
i, being classified as class j by the PU classifier. Mathematically, we denote ˜
Cij as:
˜
Cij = P(PUθ(xg) = j|y = i) = Ez[I{P Uθ(xg)=j|y=i}],
(5)
where xg = G(z, y = i) and I is the indicator function. Owing to the stochastic optimization
nature when training deep neural networks, we incorporate the estimation of ˜
C in the processing
of training by Exponential Moving Average (EMA) method. This choice can balance the utilization
of information from previous training samples and the updated PU classifier to estimate ˜
C. We
formulate the update of ˜
C(l+1) in the l-th mini-batch as follows:
˜
C(l+1) = λ ˜
C(l) + (1 −λ)∆
˜
C
Xl,
(6)
where ∆˜
C
Xl denotes the incremental change of ˜
C on the current l-th mini-batch data Xl via Eq. 5. λ
is the averaging coefficient in EMA.
Theoretical Guarantee of Clean Data Distribution Firstly, we denote O(x) as the oracle class
of sample x from an oracle classifier O(·). Let πi, i = 1, ..., K +1, be the class-prior probability
of the class i in the multi-positive unlabeled setting. Theorem 1 proves the optimal condition of
CNI-CGAN to guarantee the convergence to the clean data distribution. The proof is provided in
Appendix A.
Theorem 1. (Optimal Condition of CNI-CGAN) Let P g be a probabilistic transition matrix where
P g
ij = P(O(xg) = j|y = i) indicates the probability of sample xg with the oracle label j generated
by G with the initial label i. We assume that the conditional sample space of each class is disjoint
with each other, then
(1) P g is a permutation matrix if the generator G in CNI-CGAN is optimal, with the permutation,
compared with an identity matrix, only happens on rows r where corresponding πr, r ∈r are equal.
(2) If P g is an identity matrix and the generator G in CNI-CGAN is optimal, then pr(x, y) =
pg(x, y) where pr(x, y) and pg(x, y) are the real and the generating joint distribution, respectively.
Briefly speaking, CNI-CGAN can learn the clean data distribution if P g is an identity matrix. More
importantly, the method we elaborate till now has already guaranteed Pg as a permutation matrix,
which is very close to an identity one. We need an additional constraint, although the permutation
happens only when same class-prior probabilities exist.
The Auxiliary Loss The optimal G in CNI-CGAN can only guarantee that pg(x, y) is close to
pr(x, y) as the optimal permutation matrix P g is close to the identity matrix. Hence in practice, to
ensure that we can exactly learn an identity matrix for P g and thus achieve the clean data distri-
bution, we introduce an auxiliary loss to encourage a larger trace of P g, i.e., PK+1
i=1 P(O(xg) =
i)|y = i). As O(·) is intractable, we approximate it by the current PU classifier PUθ(xg). Then we
obtain the auxiliary loss ℓaux:
ℓaux(z, y) = max{κ −
1
K + 1
K+1
X
i=1
Ez(I{P Uθ(xg)=i|y=i}), 0},
(7)
where κ ∈(0, 1) is a hyper-parameter. With the support of auxiliary loss, P g has the tendency to
converge to the identity matrix where CNI-CGAN can learn the clean data distribution even in the
presence of noisy labels.
Comparison with RCGAN (Thekumparampil et al., 2018; Kaneko et al., 2019) The the-
oretical property of CNI-CGAN has a major advantage over existing Robust CGAN (RC-
GAN) (Thekumparampil et al., 2018; Kaneko et al., 2019), for which the optimal condition can
only be achieved when the label confusion matrix is known a priori. Although heuristics can be
employed, such as RCGAN-U (Thekumparampil et al., 2018), to handle the unknown label noise
setting, these approaches still lack the theoretical guarantee to converge to the clean data distribution.
To guarantee the efficacy of our approach, one implicit and mild assumption is that our PU classifier
will not overfit on the training data, while our non-negative estimator helps to ensure that it as
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explained in Section 2.1. To further clarify the optimization process of CNI-CGAN, we elaborate
the training steps of D and G, respectively.
D-Step: We train D on an adversarial loss from both the real data and the generated (xg, ˜
y), where
˜
y is corrupted by ˜
C. ˜
Cy denotes the y-th row of ˜
C. We formulate the loss of D as:
max
D∈F
E
x∼p(x)[φ(D(x, PUθ(x)))] +
E
z∼PZ ,y∼PY
˜
y|y∼˜
Cy
[φ(1 −D(G(z, y), ˜
y))],
(8)
where F is a family of discriminators and PZ is the distribution of latent space vector z, e.g.,
a Normal distribution. PY is a discrete uniform distribution on [K + 1] and φ is the measuring
function.
G-Step: We train G additionally on the auxiliary loss ℓaux(z, y) as follows:
min
G∈G
E
z∼PZ ,y∼PY
˜
y|y∼˜
Cy
[φ(1 −D(G(z, y), ˜
y)) + βℓaux(z, y)] ,
(9)
where β controls the strength of auxiliary loss and G is a family of generators. In summary, our
CNI-CGAN conducts K +1 classes generation, which can be further leveraged to benefit the K + 1
PU classification via data augmentation.
Algorithm 1 Alternating Minimization for PU Learning and Classifier-Noise-Invariant Generation.
Input: Training data (Xp, Xu). Batch size M and hyper-parameter β > 0, λ, κ ∈(0, 1). L0 and
L ∈N +. Initializing ˜
C(1) as identity matrix. Number of batches N during the training.
Output: Model parameter for generator G, and θ for the PU classifier fθ.
1: / * Pre-train PU classifier fθ * /
2: for i = 1 to N do
3:
Update fθ by descending its stochastic gradient of e
Rpu
fθ; X i

via Eq. 4.
4: end for
5: repeat
6:
/ * Update CNI-CGAN * /
7:
for l = 1 to L do
8:
Sample {z1, ..., zM}, {y1, ..., yM} and {x1, ..., xM} from PZ, PY and all training data,
respectively, and then sample {˜
y1, ..., ˜
yM} through the current ˜
C(l). Then, update the
discriminator D by ascending its stochastic gradient of
1
M
M
X
i=1
[φ(D(xi, PUθ(xi)))] + φ(1 −D(G(zi, yi), ˜
yi))].
9:
Sample {z1, ..., zM} and {y1, ..., yM} from PZ and PY , and then sample {˜
y1, ..., ˜
yM}
through the current ˜
C(l). Update the generator G by descending its stochastic gradient of
1
M
M
X
i=1
[φ(1 −D(G(zi, yi), ˜
yi)) + βℓaux(yi, zi)].
10:
if l ≥L0 then
11:
Compute ∆˜
C
Xl =
1
M
PM
i=1 I{P Uθ(G(zi,yi))|yi} via Eq. 5, and then estimate ˜
C by
˜
C(l+1) = λ ˜
C(l) + (1 −λ)∆
˜
C
Xl.
12:
end if
13:
end for
14:
/ * Update PU classifier via Data Augmentation * /
15:
Sample {z1, ..., zM} and {y1, ..., yM} from PZ and PY , respectively, and then update the
PU classifier fθ by descending its stochastic gradient of
1
M
M
X
i=1
ℓCE (fθ (G(zi, yi)) , yi) .
16: until convergence
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3
ALGORITHM
Firstly, we obtain a PU classifier fθ trained on multi-positive and unlabeled dataset with the par-
allel non-negative estimator derived in Section 2.1. Then we train our CNI-CGAN, described in
Section 2.2, on all data with pseudo labels predicted by the pre-trained PU classifier. As our CNI-
CGAN is robust to noisy labels, we leverage the data generated by CNI-CGAN to conduct data
augmentation to improve the PU classifier. Finally, we implement the joint optimization for the
training of CNI-CGAN and the data augmentation of the PU classifier. We summarize the proce-
dure in Algorithm 1 and provide more details in Appendix C.
Computational Cost Analysis In the implementation of our CNI-CGAN, we need to additionally
estimate ˜
C, a (K + 1) × (K + 1) matrix. The computational cost of this small matrix is negligible
compared with the updating of discriminator and generator networks, although the estimation of ˜
C
is crucial.
Simultaneous Improvement on PU Learning and Generation with Extra Data From the per-
spective of PU classification, due to the theoretical guarantee from Theorem 1, CNI-CGAN is capa-
ble of learning a clean data distribution out of noisy pseudo labels predicted by the pre-trained PU
classifier. Hence, the following data augmentation has the potential to improve the generalization
of PU classification regardless of the specific form of the PU estimator. From the perspective of
generation with extra data, the predicted labels on unlabeled data from the PU classifier can provide
CNI-CGAN with more supervised signals, thus further improving the quality of generation. Due
to the joint optimization, both the PU classification and conditional generative models are able to
improve each other reciprocally, as demonstrated in the following experiments.
4
EXPERIMENT
Experimental Setup We perform our approaches and several baselines on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST
and CIFAR-10. We select the first 5 classes on MNIST and 5 non-clothes classes on Fashion-
MNIST, respectively, for K + 1 classification (K = 5). To verify the consistent effectiveness of our
method in the standard binary PU setting, we pick the 4 categories of transportation tools in CIFAR-
10 as the one-class positive dataset. As for the baselines, the first is CGAN-P, where a Vanilla
CGAN (Mirza & Osindero, 2014) is trained only on limited positive data. Another natural baseline
is CGAN-A where a Vanilla CGAN is trained on all data with labels given by the PU classifier.
10
2
10
1
0
20
40
60
80
100
Generator Label Accuracy(%)
MNIST
CGAN-P
CGAN-A
Ours
10
2
10
1
Positive Rate
65
70
75
80
85
90
95
PU Accuracy(%)
MNIST
Original PU
CGAN-A
Ours
10
2
10
1
75
80
85
90
95
100
Generator Label Accuracy(%)
Fashion-MNIST
CGAN-P
CGAN-A
Ours
10
2
10
1
Positive Rate
80.0
82.5
85.0
87.5
90.0
92.5
95.0
97.5
PU Accuracy(%)
Fashion-MNIST
Original PU
CGAN-A
Ours
10
2
10
1
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
4.5
Inception Score
CIFAR-10
CGAN-P
CGAN-A
Ours
10
2
10
1
Positive Rate
78
80
82
84
86
88
90
PU Accuracy(%)
CIFAR-10
Original PU
CGAN-A
Ours
Figure 2: Generation and classification performance of CGAN-P, CGAN-A and Ours on three
datasets. Results of CGAN-P (blue lines) on PU accuracy do not exist since CGAN-P generates
only K classes data rather than K + 1 categories that the PU classifier needs.
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The last baseline is RCGAN-U (Thekumparampil et al., 2018) where the confusion matrix is totally
learnable while training. For fair comparisons, we choose the same GAN architecture. Through a
line search of hyper-parameters, we choose κ as 0.75, β as 5.0 and λ = 0.99 across all the datasets.
We set L0 as 5 in Algorithm 1. More details about hyper-parameters can be found in Appendix D.
Evaluation Metrics For MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, we mainly use Generator Label Accu-
racy (Thekumparampil et al., 2018) and PU Accuracy to evaluate the quality of generated images.
Generator Label Accuracy compares specified y from CGANs to the true class of the generated ex-
amples through a pre-trained (almost) oracle classifier f. In experiments, we pre-trained two K+1
classifiers with 99.28% and 98.23% accuracy on the two datasets, respectively. Additionally, the
increased PU Accuracy measures the closeness between generated data distribution and test (almost
real) data distribution for the PU classification, serving as a key indicator to reflect the quality of
generated images. For CIFAR 10, we use both Inception Score (Salimans et al., 2016) to evaluate
the quality of the generated samples, and the increased PU Accuracy to quantify the improvement
of generated samples on the PU classification.
4.1
GENERATION AND CLASSIFICATION PERFORMANCE
We set the whole training dataset as the unlabeled data and select certain amount of positive data
with the ratio of Positive Rate. Figure 2 presents the trend of Generator Label Accuracy, Inception
Score and PU Accuracy as the Positive Rate increases. It turns out that CNI-CGAN outperforms
CGAN-P and CGAN-A consistently especially when the Positive Rate is small, i.e. little positive
data. Remarkably, our approach enhances the PU accuracy greatly when exposed to low positive
rates, while CGAN-A even worsens the original PU classifier sometimes in this scenario due to the
existence of too much label noise given by a less accurate PU classifier. Meanwhile, when more su-
pervised positive data are given, the PU classifier generalizes better and then provides more accurate
labels, conversely leading to more consistent and better performance for all methods. Besides, note
that even though the CGAN-P achieves comparable generator label accuracy on MNIST, it results
in a lower Inception Score. We demonstrate this in Appendix D.
Table 1: PU classification accuracy of RCGAN-U and Ours across three datasets. Final PU accuracy
represents the accuracy of PU classifier after the data augmentation.
Final PU Accuracy \ Positive Rates (%)
0.2%
0.5%
1.0%
10.0%
MNIST
Original PU
68.86
76.75
86.94
95.88
RCGAN-U
87.95
95.24
95.86
97.80
Ours
96.33
96.43
96.71
97.82
Fashion-MNIST
Original PU
80.68
88.25
93.05
95.99
RCGAN-U
89.21
92.05
94.59
97.24
Ours
89.23
93.82
95.16
97.33
CIFAR-10
Original PU
76.79
80.63
85.53
88.43
RCGAN-U
83.13
86.22
88.22
90.45
Ours
87.64
87.92
88.60
90.69
To verify the advantage of theoretical property for our CNI-CGAN, we further compare it with
RCGCN-U (Thekumparampil et al., 2018; Kaneko et al., 2019), the heuristic version of robust gen-
eration against unknown noisy labels setting without the theoretical guarantee of optimal condition.
As observed in Table 1, our method outperforms RCGAN-U especially when the positive rate is
low. When the amount of positive labeled data is relatively large, e.g., 10.0%, both our approach
and RCGAN-U can obtain comparable performance.
Visualization To further demonstrate the superiority of CNI-CGAN compared with the other base-
lines, we present some generated images within K +1 classes from CGAN-A, RCGAN-U and CNI-
CGAN on MNIST, and high-quality images from CNI-CGAN on Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10,
in Figure 3. In particular, we choose the positive rate as 0.2% on MNIST, yielding the initial PU
classifier with 69.14% accuracy. Given the noisy labels on all data, our CNI-CGAN can generate
more accurate images of each class visually compared with CGAN-A and RCGAN-U. Results of
Fashion-MNIST and comparison with CGAN-P on CIFAR-10 can refer to Appendix E.
7
Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2022
MNIST: Positive Rate 0.2%, Initial PU: 69.14%
Generator Label Accuracy
39.67%                           81.58%                             96.33% 
CGAN-A                    RCGAN-U                   CNI-CGAN                        
CNI-CGAN
Fashion-MNIST                       CIFAR-10                       
Figure 3: Visualization of generated samples on three datasets. Rows below the red line represent
the negative class. We highlight the erroneously generated images with red boxes on MNIST.
4.2
ROBUSTNESS OF OUR APPROACH
Robustness against the Initial PU accuracy The auxiliary loss can help the CNI-CGAN to learn
the clean data distribution regardless of the initial accuracy of PU classifiers. To verify that, we
select distinct positive rates, yielding the pre-trained PU classifiers with different initial accuracies.
Then we perform our method based on these PU classifiers. Figure 4 suggests that our approach
can still attain the similar generation quality under different initial PU accuracies after sufficient
training, although better initial PU accuracy can be beneficial to the generation performance in the
early phase.
10
2
10
3
10
4
Number of Training Iterations
0
20
40
60
80
100
GAN: Generator Label Accuracy (%)
MNIST
Initial PU 77.87%
Initial PU 84.57%
Initial PU 91.28%
10
2
10
3
10
4
10
5
Number of Training Iterations
0
20
40
60
80
100
GAN: Generator Label Accuracy (%)
Fashion MNIST
Initial PU 88.27%
Initial PU 91.03%
Initial PU 94.02%
10
2
10
3
10
4
Number of Training Iterations
78
80
82
84
86
88
90
PU Accuracy(%)
CIFAR 10
Initial PU 79.49%
Initial PU 82.51%
Initial PU 85.45%
Figure 4: Tendency of generation performance as the training iterations increase on three datasets.
Robustness against the Unlabeled data In real scenarios, we are more likely to have little knowl-
edge about the extra data we have. To further verify the robustness of CNI-CGAN against the
unknown distribution of extra data, we test different approaches across different amounts and dis-
tributions of the unlabeled data. Particularly, we consider two different types of distributions for
unlabeled data. Type 1 is [
1
K+1, ...,
1
K+1,
1
K+1] where the number of data in each class, including
the negative data, is even, while type 2 is [ 1
2K , ... 1
2K , 1
2] where the negative data makes up half of
all unlabeled data. In experiments, we focus on the PU Accuracy to evaluate both the generation
quality and the improvement of PU learning. For MNIST, we choose 1% and 0.5% for two settings
while we opt for 0.5% and 0.2% on both Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10.
Figure 5 manifests that the accuracy of PU classifier exhibits a slight ascending tendency with the
increasing of the number of unlabeled data. More importantly, our CNI-CGAN almost consistently
outperforms other baselines across different amount of unlabeled data as well as distinct distributions
of unlabeled data. This verifies that the robustness of our proposal to the distribution of extra data
can be maintained potentially. We leave the investigation on the robustness against more imbalanced
situations as future works.
8
Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2022
10
3
10
4
50
60
70
80
90
100
Distribution Type 1: PU Acc(%)
MNIST
Original PU
CGAN-A
RCGAN-U
Ours
10
3
10
4
Number of Unlabeled Data
75
80
85
90
95
100
Distribution Type 2: PU Acc(%)
MNIST
Original PU
CGAN-A
RCGAN-U
Ours
10
4
70
75
80
85
90
95
100
Distribution Type 1: PU Acc(%)
Fashion-MNIST
Original PU
CGAN-A
RCGAN-U
Ours
10
4
Number of Unlabeled Data
70
75
80
85
90
95
100
Distribution Type 2: PU Acc(%)
Fashion-MNIST
Original PU
CGAN-A
RCGAN-U
Ours
10
4
70
75
80
85
90
95
100
Distribution Type 1: PU Acc(%)
CIFAR-10
Original PU
CGAN-A
RCGAN-U
Ours
10
4
Number of Unlabeled Data
70
75
80
85
90
95
100
Distribution Type 2: PU Acc(%)
CIFAR-10
Original PU
CGAN-A
RCGAN-U
Ours
Figure 5: PU Classification accuracy of CGAN-A, RCGAN-U and Ours after joint optimization
across different amounts and distribution types of unlabeled data.
5
RELATED WORKS
Positive-Unlabeled (PU) Learning.
Positive and Unlabeled (PU) Learning is the setting where
a learner has only access to positive examples and unlabeled data (Bekker & Davis, 2020; Kiryo
et al., 2017). One related work (Hou et al., 2018) employed GANs (Goodfellow et al., 2014) to
recover both positive and negative data distribution to step away from overfitting. Kato et al. (Kato
et al., 2018) focused on remedying the selection bias in the PU learning. Besides, Multi-Positive
and Unlabeled Learning (Xu et al., 2017) extended the binary PU setting to the multi-class version,
therefore adapting to more practical applications. By contrast, our multi-positive unlabeled method
absorbs the advantages of previous approaches, and in the meanwhile intuitively extends them to fit
the differential deep neural networks optimization.
Conditional GANs on Few Labels Data.
To attain high-quality images with both fidelity and di-
versity, the training of generative models requires a large dataset. To reduce the need of huge amount
of data, the vast majority of methods (Noguchi & Harada, 2019; Yamaguchi et al., 2019; Zhao et al.,
2020) attempted to transfer prior knowledge of the pre-trained generator. Another branch (Lucic
et al., 2019) is to leverage self- and supervised learning to add pseudo labels on the in-distribution
unlabeled data in order to expand labeled dataset. Compared with this approach, our strategy can be
viewed to automatically “pick” useful in-distribution data from total unknown unlabeled data via PU
learning framework, and then constructs robust conditional GANs to generate clean data distribution
out of predicted label noise. Please refer to more related works in Appendix B.
6
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
In this paper, we proposed a new method, CNI-CGAN, to jointly exploit PU classification and
conditional generation. It is, to our best knowledge, the first method of such kind to break the ceiling
of class-label scarcity, by combining two promising yet separate methodologies to gain massive
mutual improvements. CNI-CGAN can learn the clean data distribution from noisy labels given by
a PU classifier, and then enhance the performance of PU classification through data augmentation
in various settings. We have demonstrated, both theoretically and experimentally, the superiority
of our proposal on diverse benchmark datasets in an exhaustive and comprehensive manner. In the
future, it will be promising to investigate learning strategies on imbalanced data, e.g., cost-sensitive
learning (Elkan, 2001), to extend our approach to broader settings, which will further cater to real-
world scenarios where highly unbalanced data are commonly available. In addition, the leverage of
soft labels in the design of CNI-CGAN is also promising.
9
Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2022
Ethics Statement.
Our designed CNI-CGAN framework can interplay with the PU classification
and robust generation, which can mitigate the scarcity of class-labeled data. Leveraging extra data
may correlate with the privacy issue as the privacy issue still exists in generative models. Thus,
a privacy-guaranteed version of our algorithm can be further proposed in the future to handle the
potential privacy issue.
Reproducibility Statement.
For the theoretical part, we clearly state the related assumption and
detailed proof process in Appendix A. In terms of the algorithm, our implementation is directly
adapted from the public one of generative models and PU learning.
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A
APPENDIX: PROOF OF THEOREM 1
Firstly, we recall some definitions. Denote xr, xg as the real training and generated samples, respectively. x are
the population of all data, and xr are sampled from p(x). yg represents the initial labels for the generator G,
while ˜
y indicates the labels perturbed by ˜
C from yg. The class-prior πi meets πi = P(yg = i) = P(O(xr) =
i). For a rigorous proof of Theorem 1, we elaborate it again in the appendix.
Theorem 1
We assume that the following three mild assumptions can be met: (a) PU classifier is not over-
fitting on the training data, (b) P(PUθ(xg)|O(xg), yg) = P(PUθ(xg)|O(xg)), (c) the conditional sample
space is disjoint from each other class. Then,
(1) P g is a permutation matrix if the generator G in CNI-CGAN is optimal, with the permutation, compared
with an identity matrix, only happens on rows r where corresponding πr, r ∈r are equal.
(2) If P g is an identity matrix and the generator G in CNI-CGAN is optimal, then pr(x, y) = pg(x, y) where
pr(x, y) and pg(x, y) are the real and generating joint distribution, respectively.
A.1
PROOF OF (1)
Proof. For a general setting, the oracle class of xg given by label yg is not necessarily equal to PUθ(xg). Thus,
we consider the oracle class of xg, i.e., O(xg) in the proof.
Optimal G. In CNI-CGAN, G is optimal if and only if
pr(xr, PUθ(xr)) = pg(xg, ˜
y).
(10)
The equivalence of joint probability distribution can further derive the equivalence of marginal distribution, i.e.,
pr(xr) = pg(xg). We define a probability matrix C where Cij = P(PUθ(x) = j|O(x) = i) where x are the
population data. According to (c), we can apply O(·) on both xr and xg in Eq. 10. Then we have:
P(O(xr) = i, PUθ(xr) = j)
(c)
= P(O(xg) = i, ˜
y = j)
P(O(xr) = i)P(PUθ(xr) = j|O(xr) = i) =
K+1
X
k=1
P(yg = k, O(xg) = i)P(˜
y = j|yg = k, O(xg) = i)
πiCij
(a)
=
K+1
X
k=1
P(O(xg) = i|yg = k)P(yg = k)P(˜
y = j|yg = k)
πiCij =
K+1
X
k=1
P g⊤
ik πk ˜
Ckj,
(11)
where assumption (a) indicates that PUθ(xr) is close to PUθ(x) so that P(PUθ(xr) = j|O(xr) = i) =
P(PUθ(x) = j|O(x) = i). Then the corresponding matrix form follows as
ΠC = P g⊤Π ˜
C
(12)
Definition. According to the definition of ˜
C and Law of Total Probability, we have:
P(yg = i)P(PUθ(xg) = j|yg = i) =
πi
K+1
X
k=1
P(O(xg) = k|yg = i)P(PUθ(xg) = j|O(xg) = k, yg = i)
πi ˜
Cij
(b)
= πi
K+1
X
k=1
P g
ikP(PUθ(xg) = j|O(xg) = k)
πi ˜
Cij = πi
K+1
X
k=1
P g
ikCkj,
(13)
where the last equation is met as p(xg) is close to p(x) when G is optimal, and thus P(PUθ(xg) = j|O(xg) =
k) = P(PUθ(x) = j|O(x) = k). Then we consider the corresponding matrix form as follows
Π ˜
C = ΠP gC
(14)
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Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2022
where Π is the diagonal matrix of prior vector π. Combining Eq. 14 and 12, we have P g⊤ΠP g = Π, which
indicates P g is a general orthogonal matrix. In addition, the element of P g is non-negative and the sum of each
row is 1. Therefore, we have P g is a permutation matrix with permutation compared with the identity matrix
only happens on rows r where corresponding πr, r ∈r are equal. Particularly, if all πi are different from
each other, then permutation operation will not happen, indicating the optimal conditional of P g is the identity
matrix.
A.2
PROOF OF (2)
We additionally denote yr as the real label of real sample xr, i.e., yr = O(xr). According to the optimal
condition of G in Eq. 10, we have pr(xr) = pg(xg). Since we have P g is an identity matrix, then O(xg) = yg
a.e. Thus, we have pg(xg|yg = i) = pg(xg|O(xg) = i), ∀i = 1, .., K + 1. According the assumption (c) and
Eq. 10, we have pr(xr|O(xr) = i) = pg(xg|O(xg) = i). In addition, we know that pr(xr|O(xr) = i) =
pr(xr|yr = i), thus we have pr(xr|yr = i) = pg(xg|yg = i). Further, we consider the identical class-prior
πi. Finally, we have
pr(xr|yr = i)πi = pg(xg|yg = i)πi
pr(xr|yr = i)p(O(xr) = i) = pg(xg|yg = i)p(yg = i)
pr(xr|yr = i)p(yr = i) = pg(xg|yg = i)p(yg = i)
pr(xr, yr) = pg(xg, yg).
(15)
B
APPENDIX: MORE RELATED WORKS
Positive-Unlabeled (PU) Learning.
Positive and Unlabeled (PU) Learning is the setting where a learner
has only access to positive examples and unlabeled data (Bekker & Davis, 2020; Kiryo et al., 2017). One related
work (Hou et al., 2018) employed GANs (Goodfellow et al., 2014) to recover both positive and negative data
distribution to step away from overfitting. Kato et al. (Kato et al., 2018) focused on remedying the selection
bias in the PU learning. Besides, Multi-Positive and Unlabeled Learning (Xu et al., 2017) extended the binary
PU setting to the multi-class version, therefore adapting to more practical applications. By contrast, our multi-
positive unlabeled method absorbs the advantages of previous approaches, and in the meanwhile intuitively
extends them to fit the differential deep neural networks optimization.
Conditional GANs on Few Labels Data.
To attain high-quality images with both fidelity and diversity,
the training of generative models requires a large dataset. To reduce the need of huge amount of data, the
vast majority of methods (Noguchi & Harada, 2019; Yamaguchi et al., 2019; Zhao et al., 2020) attempted to
transfer prior knowledge of the pre-trained generator. Another branch (Lucic et al., 2019) is to leverage self-
and supervised learning to add pseudo labels on the in-distribution unlabeled data in order to expand labeled
dataset. Compared with this approach, our strategy can be viewed to automatically “pick” useful in-distribution
data from total unknown unlabeled data via PU learning framework, and then constructs robust conditional
GANs to generate clean data distribution out of predicted label noise.
Robust GANs.
Robust Conditional GANs (Thekumparampil et al., 2018; Kaneko et al., 2019) were pro-
posed to defend against class-dependent noisy labels. The main idea of these methods is to corrupt labels of
generated samples before feeding to the adversarial discriminator, forcing the generator to produce sample with
clean labels. Another supplementary investigation (Koshy Thekumparampil et al., 2019) explored the scenario
when CGANs get exposed to missing or ambiguous labels, while another work (Chrysos et al., 2018) leveraged
the structure of the model in the target space to address this issue. In contrast, the noises in our model stem
from the prediction error of a given classifier. We employ the imperfect classifier to estimate the label confusion
noise, yielding a new branch of Robust CGANs against “classifier” label noises.
Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL).
One crucial issue in SSL (Miyato et al., 2018; Yu et al., 2019; Sun
et al., 2019) is how to tackle with the mismatch of unlabeled and labeled data. Augmented Distribution Align-
ment (Wang et al., 2019) was proposed to leverage adversarial training to alleviate the bias, but they focused on
the empirical distribution mismatch owing to the limited number of labeled data. Further, Uncertainty Aware
Self-Distillation (Yanbei Chen, 2019) was proposed to concentrate on this under-studied problem, which can
guarantee the effectiveness of learning. In contrast, our approach leverages the PU learning to construct the
“open world” classification.
Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) Detection
OOD Detection is one classical but always vibrant machine
learning problem. PU learning can be used for the detection of outliers in an unlabeled dataset with knowledge
only from a collection of inlier data (Hido et al., 2008; Smola et al., 2009). Another interesting and related
14
Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2022
Table 2: Further evaluation of CGAN-P and Ours from the perspective of Inception Score on MNIST
and Fashion-MNIST datasets.
Positive Rates
0.75%
1.0%
3.0%
5.0%
10.0%
Inception Score (± Standard Deviation)
MNIST
CGAN-P
5.08±0.02
5.10±0.03
5.09±0.02
5.14±0.03
5.10±0.04
Ours
5.60±0.01
5.59±0.02
5.65±0.02
5.52±0.01
5.63±0.02
Fashion-MNIST
CGAN-P
4.95±0.03
5.01 ± 0.03
5.04 ± 0.04
5.02±0.04
5.00 ±0.03
Ours
4.99 ± 0.02
5.01 ± 0.02
5.03±0.01
5.07 ± 0.02
5.04 ± 0.02
work is Outlier Exposure (Hendrycks et al., 2018), an approach that leveraged an auxiliary dataset to enhance
the anomaly detector based on existing limited data. This problem is similar to our generation task, the goal of
which is to take better advantage of extra dataset, especially out-of-distribution data, to boost the generation.
Learning from Noisy Labels
Rotational-Decoupling Consistency Regularization (RDCR) (Tsung
Wei Tsai, 2019) was designed to integrate the consistency-based methods with the self-supervised rotation
task to learn noise-tolerant representations. Mutual Mean-Teaching (Ge et al., 2020) was proposed to refine the
soft labels on person re-identification task by averaging the parameters of two neural networks . In addition,
the data with noisy labels can also be viewed as bad data. Another work (Guo et al., 2019) provided a worst-
case learning formulation from bad data, and designed a data-generation scheme in an adversarial manner,
augmenting data to improve the current classifier.
C
APPENDIX: DETAILS ABOUT ALGORITHM 1
Similar in (Kiryo et al., 2017), we utilize the sigmoid loss ℓsig(t, y) = 1/(1 + exp(ty)) in the implementation
of the PU learning. Besides, we denote ri = b
R−
u
g; X i
u


−πp b
R−
p
g; X i
p


in the i-th mini-batch. Instructed
by the algorithm in (Kiryo et al., 2017), if ri < 0 we turn to optimize −∇θri in order to make this mini-batch
less overfitting, which is slightly different from Eq. 4.
D
APPENDIX: DETAILS ABOUT EXPERIMENTS
PU classifier and GAN architecture
For the PU classifier, we employ 6 convolutional layers with dif-
ferent number of filters on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR 10, respectively. For the GAN architecture,
we leverage the architecture of generator and discriminator in the tradition conditional GANs (Mirza & Osin-
dero, 2014). To guarantee the convergence of RCGAN-U, we replace Batch Normalization with Instance Batch
Normalization. The latent space dimensions of generator are 128, 128, 256 for the three datasets, respectively.
As for the optimization of GAN, we deploy the avenue same as WGAN-GP (Gulrajani et al., 2017) to pursue
desirable generation quality. Specifically, we set update step of discriminator as 1.
Fashion-MNIST: Positive Rate 0.3%, Initial PU: 85.41%
Generator Label Accuracy
81.17%                           94.95%                             95.13% 
CGAN-A                    RCGAN-U                   CNI-CGAN                        
Figure 6: Visualization of generated samples from several baselines and ours on Fashion-MNIST.
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Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2022
CIFAR-10: Positive Rate 0.3%, Initial PU: 79.46%
CGAN-P                                               CNI-CGAN                        
Figure 7: Visualization of generated samples from CGAN-P and ours on CIFAR-10.
Choice of Hyper-parameters
We choose κ as 0.75, β as 5.0 and λ = 0.99 across all the approaches.
The learning rates of PU classifier and CGAN are 0.001 and 0.0001, respectively. In the alternate minimization
process, we set the update step as 1 for PU classifier after updating the CGAN, and L0 as 5 in Algorithm 1.
We used the same and sufficient epoch for all settings (180 epochs for joint optimization) to guarantee the
convergence as well as for fair comparisons.
Further Evaluation of CGAN-P and Ours from the Aspect of Inception Score
To better verify
our approach can generate more pleasant images than CGAN-P, we additionally compare the Inception Score
these two methods attain. Specifically, we trained a (almost) perfect classifier with 99.21 % and 91.33% accu-
racy for MNIST and Fashion-MNIST respectively. Then we generate 50,000 samples from the two approaches
to compute Inception Score, the results of which are exhibited in Table 2. It turns out that our method attain
the consistent superiority against CGAN-P on the Inception Score for MNIST, even though the generator label
accuracy of these two approaches are comparable. Note that the two method obtains the similar Inception Score
on Fashion-MNIST, but our strategy outperforms CGAN-P significantly from the perspective of generator label
accuracy. Overall, we can claim that our method is better than CGAN-P.
E
APPENDIX: MORE IMAGES
We additionally show some generated images on other datasets generated by baselines and CNI-CGAN, shown
in Figure 6. Note that we highlight the erroneously generated images with red boxes. Specifically, on Fashion-
MNIST our approach can generated images with more accurate labels compared with CGAN-A and RCGAN-
U. Additionally, the quality of generated images from our approach are much better than those from CGAN-P
that only leverages limited supervised data, as shown in Figure 7 on CIFAR-10.
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