Towards Realistic Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning: Consistency Is All You Need

While long-tailed semi-supervised learning (LTSSL) has received tremendous attention in many real-world classification problems, existing LTSSL algorithms typically assume that the class distributions of labeled and unlabeled data are almost identical. Those LTSSL algorithms built upon the assumption can severely suffer when the class distributions of labeled and unlabeled data are mismatched since they utilize biased pseudo-labels from the model. To alleviate this issue, we propose a new simple method that can effectively utilize unlabeled data of unknown class distributions by introducing the adaptive consistency regularizer (ACR). ACR realizes the dynamic refinery of pseudo-labels for various distributions in a unified formula by estimating the true class distribution of unlabeled data. Despite its simplicity, we show that ACR achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of standard LTSSL benchmarks, e.g., an averaged 10% absolute increase of test accuracy against existing algorithms when the class distributions of labeled and unlabeled data are mismatched. Even when the class distributions are identical, ACR consistently outperforms many sophisticated LTSSL algorithms. We carry out extensive ablation studies to tease apart the factors that are most important to ACR’s success. Source code is available at https://github.com/Gank0078/ACR.