  Reducing the amount of labels required to train convolutional neural networks
without performance degradation is key to effectively reduce human annotation
efforts. We propose Reliable Label Bootstrapping (ReLaB), an unsupervised
preprossessing algorithm which improves the performance of semi-supervised
algorithms in extremely low supervision settings. Given a dataset with few
labeled samples, we first learn meaningful self-supervised, latent features for
the data. Second, a label propagation algorithm propagates the known labels on
the unsupervised features, effectively labeling the full dataset in an
automatic fashion. Third, we select a subset of correctly labeled (reliable)
samples using a label noise detection algorithm. Finally, we train a
semi-supervised algorithm on the extended subset. We show that the selection of
the network architecture and the self-supervised algorithm are important
factors to achieve successful label propagation and demonstrate that ReLaB
substantially improves semi-supervised learning in scenarios of very limited
supervision on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and mini-ImageNet. We reach average error
rates of $\boldsymbol{22.34}$ with 1 random labeled sample per class on
CIFAR-10 and lower this error to $\boldsymbol{8.46}$ when the labeled sample in
each class is highly representative. Our work is fully reproducible:
https://github.com/PaulAlbert31/ReLaB.
