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Improving Semi-Supervised Contrastive Learning via Entropy-Weighted Confidence Integration of Anchor-Positive Pairs

Machine Learning 2026-01-09 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Conventional semi-supervised contrastive learning methods assign pseudo-labels only to samples whose highest predicted class probability exceeds a predefined threshold, and then perform supervised contrastive learning using those selected samples. In this study, we propose a novel loss function that estimates the confidence of each sample based on the entropy of its predicted probability distribution and applies confidence-based adaptive weighting. This approach enables pseudo-label assignment even to samples that were previously excluded from training and facilitates contrastive learning that accounts for the confidence of both anchor and positive samples in a more principled manner. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves classification accuracy and achieves more stable learning performance even under low-label conditions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.04555,
  title  = {Improving Semi-Supervised Contrastive Learning via Entropy-Weighted Confidence Integration of Anchor-Positive Pairs},
  author = {Shogo Nakayama and Masahiro Okuda},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.04555},
  year   = {2026}
}