Papers › Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification

Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification

11 Nov 2019CVPR 2020 6arXiv:1911.04252archive 2025-07-28

Qizhe Xie, Minh-Thang Luong, Eduard Hovy, Quoc V. Le

We present Noisy Student Training, a semi-supervised learning approach that works well even when labeled data is abundant. Noisy Student Training achieves 88.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, which is 2.0% better than the state-of-the-art model that requires 3.5B weakly labeled Instagram images. On robustness test sets, it improves ImageNet-A top-1 accuracy from 61.0% to 83.7%, reduces ImageNet-C mean corruption error from 45.7 to 28.3, and reduces ImageNet-P mean flip rate from 27.8 to 12.2. Noisy Student Training extends the idea of self-training and distillation with the use of equal-or-larger student models and noise added to the student during learning. On ImageNet, we first train an EfficientNet model on labeled images and use it as a teacher to generate pseudo labels for 300M unlabeled images. We then train a larger EfficientNet as a student model on the combination of labeled and pseudo labeled images. We iterate this process by putting back the student as the teacher. During the learning of the student, we inject noise such as dropout, stochastic depth, and data augmentation via RandAugment to the student so that the student generalizes better than the teacher. Models are available at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/efficientnet. Code is available at https://github.com/google-research/noisystudent.

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blend google-research/noisystudent/randaugment.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 574c2e00bbe4667f · report
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conv_kernel_initializer google-research/noisystudent/efficientnet_model.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 4ae6bf83cccbb591 · report
cutout google-research/noisystudent/randaugment.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · d42d54a4353367b5 · report
dense_kernel_initializer google-research/noisystudent/efficientnet_model.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e430f1fd246b1b51 · report
efficientnet_params google-research/noisystudent/efficientnet_builder.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 00e16fdd1db60196 · report
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get_num_eval_images google-research/noisystudent/task_info.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 5edab72c1f95b154 · report
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set_shapes google-research/noisystudent/predict_label.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · d8e0266f26c70d20 · report
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small_image_crop google-research/noisystudent/preprocessing.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 033941ec31eafc06 · report
solarize google-research/noisystudent/randaugment.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e40dd3a18c0fb8bc · report
stochastic_depth google-research/noisystudent/utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · c0942e1efe9598d2 · report
batchnorm_with_activation leondgarse/Keras_efficientnet_v2_test/keras_efficientnet_v2/efficientnet_v2.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e9ed9f7ced6189ee · report
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round_filters leondgarse/Keras_efficientnet_v2_test/convert_effnetv2_model.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 5640ec0612debaea · report
se_module leondgarse/Keras_efficientnet_v2_test/keras_efficientnet_v2/efficientnet_v2.py community (archive-listed) ran · fixture could not drive it Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b43c2e4c5402cf83 · report
to_4d leondgarse/Keras_efficientnet_v2_test/keras_efficientnet_v2/augment.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · bd1c72a9d8556505 · report
conv_kernel_initializer leondgarse/Keras_efficientnet_v2_test/convert_effnetv2_model.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · cafc76d8c85afb88 · report
dense_kernel_initializer leondgarse/Keras_efficientnet_v2_test/convert_effnetv2_model.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 538d8c4191034b39 · report
from_4d leondgarse/Keras_efficientnet_v2_test/keras_efficientnet_v2/augment.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b10fb8ac53c53a97 · report

Tasks

Data AugmentationGeneral ClassificationImage Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-L2) Hardware Burden 51800G #48 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-L2) Number of params 480M #48 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-L2) Top 1 Accuracy 88.4% #48 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B7) GFLOPs 37 #118 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B7) Number of params 66M #118 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B7) Top 1 Accuracy 86.9% #118 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B6) Number of params 43M #148 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B6) Top 1 Accuracy 86.4% #148 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B5) Number of params 30M #172 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B5) Top 1 Accuracy 86.1% #172 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B4) Number of params 19M #240 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B4) Top 1 Accuracy 85.3% #240 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B3) Number of params 12M #351 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B3) Top 1 Accuracy 84.1% #351 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B2) Number of params 9.2M #538 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B2) Top 1 Accuracy 82.4% #538 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B1) Number of params 7.8M #633 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B1) Top 1 Accuracy 81.5% #633 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B0) Number of params 5.3M #803 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet NoisyStudent (EfficientNet-B0) Top 1 Accuracy 78.8% #803 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ReaL EfficientNet-L2 Accuracy 90.55% #16 of 57 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ReaL EfficientNet-L2 Params 480M #16 of 57 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationConvolutionDense ConnectionsDepthwise ConvolutionDepthwise Separable ConvolutionDropoutEfficientNetFixResInverted Residual BlockNoisy StudentPointwise ConvolutionRMSPropRandAugmentReLUSigmoid ActivationSqueeze-and-Excitation BlockStep DecayStochastic DepthTest

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