Robert-Adrian Popovici
2025
MultiMatch: Multihead Consistency Regularization Matching for Semi-Supervised Text Classification
Iustin Sirbu
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Robert-Adrian Popovici
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Cornelia Caragea
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Stefan Trausan-Matu
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Traian Rebedea
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
We introduce **MultiMatch**, a novel semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithm combining the paradigms of co-training and consistency regularization with pseudo-labeling. At its core, MultiMatch features a three-fold pseudo-label weighting module designed for selecting and filtering pseudo-labels based on head agreement and model confidence, and weighting them according to the perceived classification difficulty. This novel module enhances and unifies three existing techniques - heads agreement from **Multi**head Co-training, self-adaptive thresholds from Free**Match**, and Average Pseudo-Margins from Margin**Match** - resulting in a holistic approach that improves robustness and performance in SSL settings.Experimental results on benchmark datasets highlight the superior performance of MultiMatch, i.e., MultiMatch achieves state-of-the-art results on 8 out of 10 setups from 5 natural language processing datasets and ranks first according to the Friedman test among 21 methods. Furthermore, MultiMatch demonstrates exceptional robustness in highly imbalanced settings, outperforming the second-best approach by 3.26%, a critical advantage for real-world text classification tasks. Our code is available on GitHub.