  We propose regularizing the empirical loss for semi-supervised learning by
acting on both the input (data) space, and the weight (parameter) space. We
show that the two are not equivalent, and in fact are complementary, one
affecting the minimality of the resulting representation, the other
insensitivity to nuisance variability. We propose a method to perform such
smoothing, which combines known input-space smoothing with a novel weight-space
smoothing, based on a min-max (adversarial) optimization. The resulting
Adversarial Block Coordinate Descent (ABCD) algorithm performs gradient ascent
with a small learning rate for a random subset of the weights, and standard
gradient descent on the remaining weights in the same mini-batch. It achieves
comparable performance to the state-of-the-art without resorting to heavy data
augmentation, using a relatively simple architecture.
