Xianqing Wen


2025

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Lightweight Contenders: Navigating Semi-Supervised Text Mining through Peer Collaboration and Self Transcendence
Qianren Mao | Weifeng Jiang | Junnan Liu | Chenghua Lin | Qian Li | Xianqing Wen | Jianxin Li | Jinhu Lu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025

The semi-supervised learning (SSL) strategy in lightweight models requires reducing annotated samples and facilitating cost-effective inference. However, the constraint on model parameters, imposed by the scarcity of training labels, limits the SSL performance. In this paper, we introduce PS-NET, a novel framework tailored for semi-supervised text mining with lightweight models. PS-NET incorporates online distillation to train lightweight student models by imitating the Teacher model. It also integrates an ensemble of student peers that collaboratively instruct each other. Additionally, PS-NET implements a constant adversarial perturbation schema to further self-augmentation by progressive generalizing. Our PS-NET, equipped with a 2-layer distilled BERT, exhibits notable performance enhancements over SOTA lightweight SSL frameworks of FLiText and Disco in SSL text classification with extremely rare labelled data.