MarginMatch: Improving Semi-Supervised Learning with Pseudo-Margins

We introduce MarginMatch, a new SSL approach combining consistency regularization and pseudo-labeling, with its main novelty arising from the use of unlabeled data training dynamics to measure pseudo-label quality. Instead of using only the model’s confidence on an unlabeled example at an arbitrary iteration to decide if the example should be masked or not, MarginMatch also analyzes the behavior of the model on the pseudo-labeled examples as the training progresses, ensuring low fluctuations in the model’s predictions from one iteration to another. MarginMatch brings substantial improvements on four vision benchmarks in low data regimes and on two large-scale datasets, emphasizing the importance of enforcing high-quality pseudo-labels. Notably, we obtain an improvement in error rate over the state-of-the-art of 3.25% on CIFAR-100 with only 25 examples per class and of 4.19% on STL-10 using as few as 4 examples per class.