  Self-supervised learning, which learns by constructing artificial labels
given only the input signals, has recently gained considerable attention for
learning representations with unlabeled datasets, i.e., learning without any
human-annotated supervision. In this paper, we show that such a technique can
be used to significantly improve the model accuracy even under fully-labeled
datasets. Our scheme trains the model to learn both original and
self-supervised tasks, but is different from conventional multi-task learning
frameworks that optimize the summation of their corresponding losses. Our main
idea is to learn a single unified task with respect to the joint distribution
of the original and self-supervised labels, i.e., we augment original labels
via self-supervision of input transformation. This simple, yet effective
approach allows to train models easier by relaxing a certain invariant
constraint during learning the original and self-supervised tasks
simultaneously. It also enables an aggregated inference which combines the
predictions from different augmentations to improve the prediction accuracy.
Furthermore, we propose a novel knowledge transfer technique, which we refer to
as self-distillation, that has the effect of the aggregated inference in a
single (faster) inference. We demonstrate the large accuracy improvement and
wide applicability of our framework on various fully-supervised settings, e.g.,
the few-shot and imbalanced classification scenarios.

Machine Learning;Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Machine Learning