Positive and Unlabeled (PU) learning aims to train a suitable classifier simply based on a set of positive data and unlabeled data. Existing PU methods usually follow a discriminative framework and yield limited classification performance, because the lack of explicit negative labels poses a great barrier in training a discriminative PU model. To address the challenge of limited supervisory information faced by discriminative PU methods, this paper introduces generative operation to PU learning in addition to the conventional discriminative operation, and proposes a novel algorithm dubbed "Discriminative-Generative Positive and Unlabeled Learning" (DGPU). Specifically, our proposed DGPU consists of a data generation stage and a discriminative annotation stage, which can benefit from each other in an iterative manner. In data generation stage, we employ a tailored diffusion model to generate high-quality negative examples and positive examples to efficiently enrich the supervisory information. In discriminative annotation stage, the classifier is further refined on the initial and generated training data. To the best of our knowledge, this study represents the first attempt to integrate diffusion models into PU learning to make generative model and discriminative model benefit from each other in a collaborative way. Thanks to this, our proposed DGPU significantly outperforms existing PU methods across a wide range of synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets. In particular, our DGPU is almost comparable to the fully supervised counterpart, and improves the test accuracy of existing state-of-the-art methods by 3.89% and 2.56% on CIFAR-10 and CelebA datasets, respectively.
Yuan et al. (Thu,) studied this question.