Keep It on a Leash: Controllable Pseudo-label Generation Towards Realistic Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning

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Main Authors: Hou, Yaxin, Han, Bo, Jia, Yuheng, Liu, Hui, Hou, Junhui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hou, Yaxin
Han, Bo
Jia, Yuheng
Liu, Hui
Hou, Junhui
author_facet Hou, Yaxin
Han, Bo
Jia, Yuheng
Liu, Hui
Hou, Junhui
contents Current long-tailed semi-supervised learning methods assume that labeled data exhibit a long-tailed distribution, and unlabeled data adhere to a typical predefined distribution (i.e., long-tailed, uniform, or inverse long-tailed). However, the distribution of the unlabeled data is generally unknown and may follow an arbitrary distribution. To tackle this challenge, we propose a Controllable Pseudo-label Generation (CPG) framework, expanding the labeled dataset with the progressively identified reliable pseudo-labels from the unlabeled dataset and training the model on the updated labeled dataset with a known distribution, making it unaffected by the unlabeled data distribution. Specifically, CPG operates through a controllable self-reinforcing optimization cycle: (i) at each training step, our dynamic controllable filtering mechanism selectively incorporates reliable pseudo-labels from the unlabeled dataset into the labeled dataset, ensuring that the updated labeled dataset follows a known distribution; (ii) we then construct a Bayes-optimal classifier using logit adjustment based on the updated labeled data distribution; (iii) this improved classifier subsequently helps identify more reliable pseudo-labels in the next training step. We further theoretically prove that this optimization cycle can significantly reduce the generalization error under some conditions. Additionally, we propose a class-aware adaptive augmentation module to further improve the representation of minority classes, and an auxiliary branch to maximize data utilization by leveraging all labeled and unlabeled samples. Comprehensive evaluations on various commonly used benchmark datasets show that CPG achieves consistent improvements, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by up to $\textbf{15.97%}$ in accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/yaxinhou/CPG.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_03993
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Keep It on a Leash: Controllable Pseudo-label Generation Towards Realistic Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning
Hou, Yaxin
Han, Bo
Jia, Yuheng
Liu, Hui
Hou, Junhui
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Current long-tailed semi-supervised learning methods assume that labeled data exhibit a long-tailed distribution, and unlabeled data adhere to a typical predefined distribution (i.e., long-tailed, uniform, or inverse long-tailed). However, the distribution of the unlabeled data is generally unknown and may follow an arbitrary distribution. To tackle this challenge, we propose a Controllable Pseudo-label Generation (CPG) framework, expanding the labeled dataset with the progressively identified reliable pseudo-labels from the unlabeled dataset and training the model on the updated labeled dataset with a known distribution, making it unaffected by the unlabeled data distribution. Specifically, CPG operates through a controllable self-reinforcing optimization cycle: (i) at each training step, our dynamic controllable filtering mechanism selectively incorporates reliable pseudo-labels from the unlabeled dataset into the labeled dataset, ensuring that the updated labeled dataset follows a known distribution; (ii) we then construct a Bayes-optimal classifier using logit adjustment based on the updated labeled data distribution; (iii) this improved classifier subsequently helps identify more reliable pseudo-labels in the next training step. We further theoretically prove that this optimization cycle can significantly reduce the generalization error under some conditions. Additionally, we propose a class-aware adaptive augmentation module to further improve the representation of minority classes, and an auxiliary branch to maximize data utilization by leveraging all labeled and unlabeled samples. Comprehensive evaluations on various commonly used benchmark datasets show that CPG achieves consistent improvements, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by up to $\textbf{15.97%}$ in accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/yaxinhou/CPG.
title Keep It on a Leash: Controllable Pseudo-label Generation Towards Realistic Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03993