Divide-and-Conquer for Enhancing Unlabeled Learning, Stability, and Plasticity in Semi-supervised Continual Learning

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Hauptverfasser: Duan, Yue, Chen, Taicai, Qi, Lei, Shi, Yinghuan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Duan, Yue
Chen, Taicai
Qi, Lei
Shi, Yinghuan
author_facet Duan, Yue
Chen, Taicai
Qi, Lei
Shi, Yinghuan
contents Semi-supervised continual learning (SSCL) seeks to leverage both labeled and unlabeled data in a sequential learning setup, aiming to reduce annotation costs while managing continual data arrival. SSCL introduces complex challenges, including ensuring effective unlabeled learning (UL), while balancing memory stability (MS) and learning plasticity (LP). Previous SSCL efforts have typically focused on isolated aspects of the three, while this work presents USP, a divide-and-conquer framework designed to synergistically enhance these three aspects: (1) Feature Space Reservation (FSR) strategy for LP, which constructs reserved feature locations for future classes by shaping old classes into an equiangular tight frame; (2) Divide-and-Conquer Pseudo-labeling (DCP) approach for UL, which assigns reliable pseudo-labels across both high- and low-confidence unlabeled data; and (3) Class-mean-anchored Unlabeled Distillation (CUD) for MS, which reuses DCP's outputs to anchor unlabeled data to stable class means for distillation to prevent forgetting. Comprehensive evaluations show USP outperforms prior SSCL methods, with gains up to 5.94% in the last accuracy, validating its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/NJUyued/USP4SSCL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_05316
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Divide-and-Conquer for Enhancing Unlabeled Learning, Stability, and Plasticity in Semi-supervised Continual Learning
Duan, Yue
Chen, Taicai
Qi, Lei
Shi, Yinghuan
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Semi-supervised continual learning (SSCL) seeks to leverage both labeled and unlabeled data in a sequential learning setup, aiming to reduce annotation costs while managing continual data arrival. SSCL introduces complex challenges, including ensuring effective unlabeled learning (UL), while balancing memory stability (MS) and learning plasticity (LP). Previous SSCL efforts have typically focused on isolated aspects of the three, while this work presents USP, a divide-and-conquer framework designed to synergistically enhance these three aspects: (1) Feature Space Reservation (FSR) strategy for LP, which constructs reserved feature locations for future classes by shaping old classes into an equiangular tight frame; (2) Divide-and-Conquer Pseudo-labeling (DCP) approach for UL, which assigns reliable pseudo-labels across both high- and low-confidence unlabeled data; and (3) Class-mean-anchored Unlabeled Distillation (CUD) for MS, which reuses DCP's outputs to anchor unlabeled data to stable class means for distillation to prevent forgetting. Comprehensive evaluations show USP outperforms prior SSCL methods, with gains up to 5.94% in the last accuracy, validating its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/NJUyued/USP4SSCL.
title Divide-and-Conquer for Enhancing Unlabeled Learning, Stability, and Plasticity in Semi-supervised Continual Learning
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05316