Self-Joint Supervised Learning

Supervised learning is a fundamental framework used to train machine learning systems. A supervised learning problem is often formulated using an i.i.d. assumption that restricts model attention to a single relevant signal at a time when predicting. This contrasts with the human ability to actively use related samples as reference when making decisions. We hypothesize that the restriction to a single signal for each prediction in the standard i.i.d. framework contributes to well-known drawbacks of supervised learning: making overconfident predictions and vulnerability to overfitting, adversarial attacks, and out-of-distribution data. To address these limitations, we propose a new supervised learning paradigm called self-joint learning that generalizes the standard approach by modeling the joint conditional distribution of two observed samples, where each sample is an image and its label. Rather than assuming samples are independent, our models explicitly learn the sample-to-sample relation of conditional independence. Our framework can naturally incorporate auxiliary unlabeled data to further improve the performance. Experiments on benchmark image datasets show our method offers significant improvement over standard supervised learning in terms of accuracy, robustness against adversarial attacks, out-of-distribution detection, and overconfidence mitigation.