# Seq-UPS: Sequential Uncertainty-aware Pseudo-label Selection for Semi-Supervised Text Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00641 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00641/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Image-based Sequence Recognition and Its Application to Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.05717/) (2015)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [BatchBALD: Efficient and Diverse Batch Acquisition for Deep Bayesian Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08158/) (2019)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [In Defense of Pseudo-Labeling: An Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-label Selection Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06329/) (2021)
- [COCO-Text: Dataset and Benchmark for Text Detection and Recognition in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.07140/) (2016)
- [Synthetic Data and Artificial Neural Networks for Natural Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2227/) (2014)
- [What Is Wrong With Scene Text Recognition Model Comparisons? Dataset and Model Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01906/) (2019)
- [ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Arbitrary-Shaped Text (RRC-ArT)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07145/) (2019)
- [ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Multi-lingual Scene Text Detection and Recognition -- RRC-MLT-2019](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00945/) (2019)
- [Towards Accurate Scene Text Recognition with Semantic Reasoning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12294/) (2020)
- [Show, Attend and Read: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Irregular Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00751/) (2018)
- [ICDAR 2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Reading Chinese Text on Signboard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09641/) (2019)
- [ICDAR 2019 Competition on Large-scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling -- RRC-LSVT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07741/) (2019)
- [Robust Scene Text Recognition with Automatic Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03915/) (2016)
- [Scene Text Detection and Recognition: The Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04256/) (2018)
- [Focusing Attention: Towards Accurate Text Recognition in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02054/) (2017)
- [ICDAR2017 Competition on Reading Chinese Text in the Wild (RCTW-17)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09585/) (2017)
- [Decoupled Attention Network for Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10205/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Advancing Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing via Segment-wise Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00919/) (2024)
- [Improving Audio-Visual Video Parsing with Pseudo Visual Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02344/) (2023)
- [DQS3D: Densely-matched Quantization-aware Semi-supervised 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13031/) (2023)
- [On the Noise Robustness of In-Context Learning for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17264/) (2024)
- [Approximately Bayes-Optimal Pseudo Label Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08883/) (2023)
- [Self-distillation Regularized Connectionist Temporal Classification Loss for Text Recognition: A Simple Yet Effective Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08806/) (2023)
- [Active Transfer Learning for Efficient Video-Specific Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05041/) (2023)
- [Sequential Visual and Semantic Consistency for Semi-supervised Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15806/) (2024)
- [Boosting Semi-Supervised Scene Text Recognition via Viewing and Summarizing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15585/) (2024)
- [SemiETS: Integrating Spatial and Content Consistencies for Semi-Supervised End-to-end Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09966/) (2025)
- [Entropy Heat-Mapping: Localizing GPT-Based OCR Errors with Sliding-Window Shannon Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00746/) (2025)
- [In all LikelihoodS: How to Reliably Select Pseudo-Labeled Data for Self-Training in Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01117/) (2023)
- [Stratified Domain Adaptation: A Progressive Self-Training Approach for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09913/) (2024)
- [Semi-supervised CAPP Transformer Learning via Pseudo-labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01419/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper looks at semi-supervised learning (SSL) for image-based text recognition. One of the most popular SSL approaches is pseudo-labeling (PL). PL approaches assign labels to unlabeled data before re-training the model with a combination of labeled and pseudo-labeled data. However, PL methods are severely degraded by noise and are prone to over-fitting to noisy labels, due to the inclusion of erroneous high confidence pseudo-labels generated from poorly calibrated models, thus, rendering threshold-based selection ineffective. Moreover, the combinatorial complexity of the hypothesis space and the error accumulation due to multiple incorrect autoregressive steps posit pseudo-labeling challenging for sequence models. To this end, we propose a pseudo-label generation and an uncertainty-based data selection framework for semi-supervised text recognition. We first use Beam-Search inference to yield highly probable hypotheses to assign pseudo-labels to the unlabelled examples. Then we adopt an ensemble of models, sampled by applying dropout, to obtain a robust estimate of the uncertainty associated with the prediction, considering both the character-level and word-level predictive distribution to select good quality pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on several benchmark handwriting and scene-text datasets show that our method outperforms the baseline approaches and the previous state-of-the-art semi-supervised text-recognition methods.