Papers › FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling

FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling

15 Oct 2021NeurIPS 2021 12arXiv:2110.08263archive 2025-07-28

BoWen Zhang, Yidong Wang, Wenxin Hou, Hao Wu, Jindong Wang, Manabu Okumura, Takahiro Shinozaki

The recently proposed FixMatch achieved state-of-the-art results on most semi-supervised learning (SSL) benchmarks. However, like other modern SSL algorithms, FixMatch uses a pre-defined constant threshold for all classes to select unlabeled data that contribute to the training, thus failing to consider different learning status and learning difficulties of different classes. To address this issue, we propose Curriculum Pseudo Labeling (CPL), a curriculum learning approach to leverage unlabeled data according to the model's learning status. The core of CPL is to flexibly adjust thresholds for different classes at each time step to let pass informative unlabeled data and their pseudo labels. CPL does not introduce additional parameters or computations (forward or backward propagation). We apply CPL to FixMatch and call our improved algorithm FlexMatch. FlexMatch achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of SSL benchmarks, with especially strong performances when the labeled data are extremely limited or when the task is challenging. For example, FlexMatch achieves 13.96% and 18.96% error rate reduction over FixMatch on CIFAR-100 and STL-10 datasets respectively, when there are only 4 labels per class. CPL also significantly boosts the convergence speed, e.g., FlexMatch can use only 1/5 training time of FixMatch to achieve even better performance. Furthermore, we show that CPL can be easily adapted to other SSL algorithms and remarkably improve their performances. We open-source our code at https://github.com/TorchSSL/TorchSSL.

PaperPDFConference PDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2110.08263")

Code

Syntology Ran 4 of 6 code samples harvested from 2 repositories linked to this paper; 2 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · violated contract; 3 ran · fixture could not drive it.

By repository: official repository: 3 samples from 1 repository, 2 ran; community (archive-listed): 3 samples from 1 repository, 2 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

torchssl/torchssl officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
beandkay/sequencematch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

6 samples harvested; 4 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 2 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · violated contract
3ran · fixture could not drive it
2unverified

Licence: 0 of the 6 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from 2 repositories linked to this paper, official or community; each sample names its own and says which. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

consistency_loss torchssl/torchssl/models/flexmatch/flexmatch.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it MIT (permissive) · 8f89311db3715e3c · report
str2bool torchssl/torchssl/flexmatch.py official repository ran · violated contract MIT (permissive) · 8605dc8a088f3db8 · report
FlexMatch torchssl/torchssl/models/flexmatch/flexmatch.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · ab70368712a20243 · report
ce_loss beandkay/sequencematch/models/flexmatch/flexmatch.py community (archive-listed) ran · fixture could not drive it MIT (permissive) · 1b2ef05b7424074f · report
consistency_loss beandkay/sequencematch/models/flexmatch/flexmatch.py community (archive-listed) ran · fixture could not drive it MIT (permissive) · 45956241e5216b30 · report
FlexMatch beandkay/sequencematch/models/flexmatch/flexmatch.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 865b358a0b1a7755 · report

Tasks

Semi-Supervised Image Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Semi-Supervised Image Classification CIFAR-10, 250 Labels FlexMatch Percentage error 4.8±0.06 #10 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Image Classification CIFAR-10, 40 Labels FlexMatch Percentage error 4.99±0.16 #5 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Image Classification CIFAR-10, 4000 Labels FlexMatch Percentage error 4.19±0.01 #15 of 49 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Image Classification CIFAR-100, 2500 Labels FlexMatch Percentage error 26.49±0.20 #10 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Image Classification CIFAR-100, 400 Labels FlexMatch Percentage error 39.94±1.62 #12 of 21 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet - 10% labeled data FlexMatch Top 1 Accuracy 64.79% #45 of 75 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Image Classification ImageNet - 10% labeled data FlexMatch Top 5 Accuracy 86.04% #45 of 75 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Image Classification cifar-100, 10000 Labels FlexMatch Percentage error 21.90±0.15 #12 of 29 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

FixMatch

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections