Language-Assisted Debiasing and Smoothing for Foundation Model-Based Semi-Supervised Learning

Abstract

Recent studies have focused on introducing pre-trained foundation models into semi-supervised learning (SSL) tasks. Nevertheless, these foundation models can exhibit biases toward different classes and tend to generate imbalanced pseudo-labels for SSL. Thus, efforts have been made to introduce the logit adjustment offset to reduce the inherent bias in foundation models for SSL tasks. Despite their success, existing foundation model-based SSL methods face challenges: 1) unreliability in the estimated logit adjustment offset, 2) overlooking the potential of linguistic knowledge in capturing model biases and 3) fail to fully exploit the unlabeled samples. To address these issues, we propose Language-Assisted Debiasing and Smoothing framework, namely LADaS, for foundation model-based SSL. It consists of two components: 1) Language-assisted Pseudo-Label Debiasing (LPLD) to reduce biases in foundation models, and 2) Language-aware Pseudo-Label Smoothing (LPLS) to fully exploit low-confidence samples to facilitate SSL training. In particular, LPLD introduces a reliability score to dynamically assess the reliability of the logit adjustment. Additionally, it incorporates a language-oriented preference to reduce model biases using linguistic knowledge derived from pre-trained language models. Finally, LPLS introduces language-aware soft pseudo-labels and devises language-aware pseudo-label smoothing loss to guide the learning of unlabeled samples with low-quality pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed LADaS.