# Pseudo-label Refinement for Improving Self-Supervised Learning Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14242 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14242/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00362/) (2020)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [Two at Once: Enhancing Learning and Generalization Capacities via IBN-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09441/) (2018)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models Advance Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05224/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [Mutual Mean-Teaching: Pseudo Label Refinery for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01526/) (2020)
- [Self-paced Contrastive Learning with Hybrid Memory for Domain Adaptive Object Re-ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02713/) (2020)
- [Joint Unsupervised Learning of Deep Representations and Image Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03628/) (2016)
- [CERT: Contrastive Self-supervised Learning for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12766/) (2020)
- [CoMatch: Semi-supervised Learning with Contrastive Graph Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11183/) (2020)
- [Invariance Matters: Exemplar Memory for Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01990/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Person Re-identification via Multi-label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09228/) (2020)
- [Debiased Learning from Naturally Imbalanced Pseudo-Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01490/) (2022)
- [Dissecting Person Re-identification from the Viewpoint of Viewpoint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02162/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Clustering with Hard-batch Triplet Loss for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12278/) (2019)
- [AD-Cluster: Augmented Discriminative Clustering for Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08787/) (2020)
- [Three Ways to Improve Semantic Segmentation with Self-Supervised Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10782/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Domain Adaptation for Computer Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10915/) (2019)
- [Group-aware Label Transfer for Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12366/) (2021)
- [Self-training with progressive augmentation for unsupervised cross-domain person re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13315/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Person Re-identification by Soft Multilabel Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06325/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Sample Uncertainty for Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08733/) (2020)
- [Dissecting Self-Supervised Learning Methods for Surgical Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00449/) (2022)
- [Cross-Dataset Person Re-Identification via Unsupervised Pose Disentanglement and Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09675/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Learning For Few-Shot Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06045/) (2019)
- [Learning to Adapt Invariance in Memory for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00485/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SERM: Self-Evolving Relevance Model with Agent-Driven Learning from Massive Query Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09515/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised learning systems have gained significant attention in recent years by leveraging clustering-based pseudo-labels to provide supervision without the need for human annotations. However, the noise in these pseudo-labels caused by the clustering methods poses a challenge to the learning process leading to degraded performance. In this work, we propose a pseudo-label refinement (SLR) algorithm to address this issue. The cluster labels from the previous epoch are projected to the current epoch cluster-labels space and a linear combination of the new label and the projected label is computed as a soft refined label containing the information from the previous epoch clusters as well as from the current epoch. In contrast to the common practice of using the maximum value as a cluster/class indicator, we employ hierarchical clustering on these soft pseudo-labels to generate refined hard-labels. This approach better utilizes the information embedded in the soft labels, outperforming the simple maximum value approach for hard label generation. The effectiveness of the proposed SLR algorithm is evaluated in the context of person re-identification (Re-ID) using unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Experimental results demonstrate that the modified Re-ID baseline, incorporating the SLR algorithm, achieves significantly improved mean Average Precision (mAP) performance in various UDA tasks, including real-to-synthetic, synthetic-to-real, and different real-to-real scenarios. These findings highlight the efficacy of the SLR algorithm in enhancing the performance of self-supervised learning systems.
