Overview

Pseudo-labeling studies how to use model-generated labels to learn from unlabeled examples, making it useful when human annotation is scarce or expensive. Common approaches include teacher–student self-training, confidence thresholding, consistency training, and iterative refinement, with applications spanning image segmentation, speech recognition, domain adaptation, and graph learning. Recent methods add calibration, uncertainty estimates, foundation-model cues, or temporal and multimodal agreement to decide which predictions to trust. The central tension is that more pseudo-labels increase coverage but can also amplify errors and confirmation bias, so gains depend on label quality, distribution shift, and the task.

Latest papers

159 papers16 papers in the last four weeks, down 36% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Feb 19, 2026

Cross Pseudo Labeling For Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection

Weakly supervised video anomaly detection aims to detect anomalies and identify abnormal categories with only video-level labels. We propose CPL-VAD, a dual-branch framework with cross pseudo labeling. The binary anomaly detection branch focuses on snippet-level anomaly localization, while the category classification branch leverages vision-language alignment to recognize abnormal event categories. By exchanging pseudo labels, the two branches transfer complementary strengths, combining temporal precision with semantic discrimination. Experiments on XD-Violence and UCF-Crime demonstrate that CPL-VAD achieves state-of-the-art performance in both anomaly detection and abnormal category classification.
Feb 1, 2026

Semi-supervised CAPP Transformer Learning via Pseudo-labeling

High-level Computer-Aided Process Planning (CAPP) generates manufacturing process plans from part specifications. It suffers from limited dataset availability in industry, reducing model generalization. We propose a semi-supervised learning approach to improve transformer-based CAPP transformer models without manual labeling. An oracle, trained on available transformer behaviour data, filters correct predictions from unseen parts, which are then used for one-shot retraining. Experiments on small-scale datasets with simulated ground truth across the full data distribution show consistent accuracy gains over baselines, demonstrating the method's effectiveness in data-scarce manufacturing environments.
Dec 11, 2025

Solving Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning from an Auto-Annotation Perspective

Semi-supervised few-shot learning (SSFSL) resembles real-world applications such as auto-annotation, as it aims to learn a model from a few labeled and abundant unlabeled task-specific examples to annotate the unlabeled ones. Despite the availability of powerful open-source Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and open-world data, existing SSFSL literature largely neglects these resources. In contrast, the related area few-shot learning (FSL) has already exploited them to boost performance. Arguably, to solve real-world auto-annotation, SSFSL should leverage such open resources. To bridge this gap, we explore established SSL methods to finetune a VLM. Unexpectedly, they significantly underperform FSL baselines that do not use unlabeled data. Our in-depth analysis reveals the root cause of failure: VLMs produce flat distributions of softmax probabilities, resulting in zero utilization of unlabeled data and weak supervision signals. To address this challenge, we propose an embarrassingly simple solution that uses temperatures to sharpen the softmax output, which not only increases the confidence scores of pseudo-labels to improve the utilization of unlabeled data, but also strengthens training supervision for effective finetuning. Furthermore, we exploit task-relevant open data, e.g., those retrieved from VLMs' publicly available pretraining set. To mitigate the imbalance and domain gaps in retrieved data, we employ a stage-wise training strategy. Building on the successful finetuning of VLMs and the exploitation of open data, we present a simple yet effective SSFSL method, Stage-Wise Finetuning with Temperatures (SWIFT). Across five benchmarks, SWIFT outperforms recent FSL and SSL methods by ∼\sim5 accuracy points. SWIFT even rivals supervised learning, which finetunes a VLM assuming unlabeled data having ground-truth labels!
Dec 10, 2025

KGOT: Unified Knowledge Graph and Optimal Transport Pseudo-Labeling for Molecule-Protein Interaction Prediction

Predicting molecule-protein interactions (MPIs) is a fundamental task in computational biology, with crucial applications in drug discovery and molecular function annotation. However, existing MPI models face two major challenges. First, the scarcity of labeled molecule-protein pairs significantly limits model performance, as available datasets capture only a small fraction of biological relevant interactions. Second, most methods rely solely on molecular and protein features, ignoring broader biological context such as genes, metabolic pathways, and functional annotations that could provide essential complementary information. To address these limitations, our framework first aggregates diverse biological datasets, including molecular, protein, genes and pathway-level interactions, and then develop an optimal transport-based approach to generate high-quality pseudo-labels for unlabeled molecule-protein pairs, leveraging the underlying distribution of known interactions to guide label assignment. By treating pseudo-labeling as a mechanism for bridging disparate biological modalities, our approach enables the effective use of heterogeneous data to enhance MPI prediction. We evaluate our framework on multiple MPI datasets including virtual screening tasks and protein retrieval tasks, demonstrating substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods in prediction accuracies and zero shot ability across unseen interactions. Beyond MPI prediction, our approach provides a new paradigm for leveraging diverse biological data sources to tackle problems traditionally constrained by single- or bi-modal learning, paving the way for future advances in computational biology and drug discovery.
Oct 16, 2025

MSPL: Multi-Step Pseudo-Labeling for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) aims to recognize and localize object categories beyond the training set. Recent approaches leverage vision-language models to generate pseudo-labels using image-text alignment, allowing detectors to generalize to unseen classes without explicit supervision. However, these methods depend heavily on single-step image-text matching, neglecting the intermediate reasoning steps crucial for interpreting semantically complex visual contexts, such as crowding or occlusion. In this paper, we introduce MSPL, a framework that incorporates multi-step visual reasoning into the pseudo-labeling process for OVD. It decomposes complex scene understanding into three interpretable steps-object localization, category recognition, and background grounding-where these intermediate reasoning states serve as rich supervision sources. Extensive experiments on standard OVD evaluation protocols demonstrate that MSPL achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior pseudo-labeling efficiency, outperforming the strong baseline by 9.4 AP50 for novel classes on OV-COCO and improving box and mask APr by 3.2 and 2.2, respectively, on OV-LVIS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hchoi256/mspl.
Jul 22, 2025

RCPN: towards robust pseudo-labels in unsupervised CLIP adaptation via consistent prototypes and neighborhoods

In unsupervised adaptation for vision-language models such as CLIP, pseudo-labels derived from zero-shot predictions often exhibit significant noise, particularly under domain shifts or in visually complex scenarios. Conventional pseudo-label filtering approaches, which rely on fixed confidence thresholds, tend to be unreliable in fully unsupervised settings. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive pseudo-labeling framework that enhances CLIP's adaptation performance by integrating prototype consistency and neighborhood-based consistency. The proposed method comprises two key components: PICS, which assesses pseudo-label accuracy based on in-class feature compactness and cross-class feature separation; and NALR, which exploits semantic similarities among neighboring samples to refine pseudo-labels dynamically. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive weighting mechanism that adjusts the influence of pseudo-labeled samples during training according to their estimated correctness. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised adaptation scenarios, delivering more accurate pseudo-labels while maintaining computational efficiency.
Jul 3, 2025

PLOT: Pseudo-Labeling via Object Tracking for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection is crucial for scalable perception across fields like autonomous driving, robotics, and surveillance. However, progress is hindered by limited 3D annotations and the inherent ambiguity of single-image geometry. Existing methods often rely on strong geometric assumptions or carefully curated datasets, which limit their applicability to real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present PLOT (Pseudo-Labeling via Object Tracking), a framework that generates 3D annotations from monocular videos without auxiliary sensors or model retraining. PLOT tracks object and background trajectories to estimate camera motion and perform object association in pose-unknown settings. These trajectories provide point correspondences that align frame-wise pseudo-LiDARs, which are then fused via simple optimization into a unified object shape robust to occlusion and viewpoint shifts. Recognizing temporal coherence as a fundamental requirement for reliable shape fusion and video perception, we design a global object memory that preserves consistent object identities across frames. PLOT achieves robust annotation quality and strong generalization on both M3OD video benchmarks and in-the-wild videos, proving its effectiveness across diverse and unconstrained domains. Project page: https://plot-eccv.github.io.
May 18, 2025

Never Skip a Batch: Dense Learning of Temporal GNNs via Adaptive Pseudo-Supervision

Temporal graph networks suffer from irregular supervision in realworld dynamic graphs, as most minibatches contain few labeled events. The lack of labels leads to high-variance gradient updates and, consequently, slow wall-clock convergence. To constructively reduce sparsity, our Moving-Averaged Labels (MAL) assigns soft pseudo-targets based on past supervised signals using a running label distribution while leaving the loss and the model architecture unchanged. Thus, supervision gaps are replaced with informative signals independent of a temporal graph model and the message passing or memory components used. Theoretical analysis supports our insight that aggregating historical supervision into moving average targets reduces stochastic gradient variance, yielding faster convergence under mild assumptions. Experimentally, for TGNv2 and DyRepv2 (our modification of DyRep) models, MAL boosts predictive performance, establishing a new SOTA, and improves time-to-accuracy (on average 6x faster to reach the top score) for a common suite of Temporal Graph Benchmark datasets.
Apr 2, 2025

Semi-Supervised Biomedical Image Segmentation via Diffusion Models and Teacher-Student Co-Training

Supervised deep learning achieves strong performance in biomedical image segmentation but relies on costly pixel-wise annotations, motivating semi-supervised approaches that exploit unlabeled data. We introduce a diffusion-based teacher--student framework in which segmentation predictions are used to condition image denoising, encouraging the production of more informative pseudo-labels. The teacher is first pretrained through an unsupervised reconstruction task using diffusion-style corruption, timestep conditioning, and denoising. Starting from a corrupted empty mask, the model predicts an intermediate segmentation that conditions image denoising, encouraging the predicted mask to capture structural information useful for recovering the original image. The resulting teacher is then co-trained with a student using supervised segmentation on labeled samples and cross pseudo-supervision on unlabeled data. We further introduce a multi-round extension during co-training, in which the teacher generates multiple stochastic image reconstructions and corresponding segmentation predictions, providing additional reconstruction and alignment signals to improve its pseudo-labels. We evaluate the proposed framework on three public 2D biomedical segmentation datasets and a 3D left atrial segmentation benchmark. Across several labeling regimes, our method achieves competitive or superior performance compared with state-of-the-art semi-supervised approaches, with the largest gains observed under severe label scarcity.