Integrating Distribution Matching into Semi-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Labeled and Unlabeled Data
This work addresses the limitation of pseudo-label quality in semi-supervised image classification by proposing a contrastive learning framework integrated with a distribution matching mechanism. For the first time in semi-supervised contrastive learning, the method explicitly aligns the feature distributions of labeled and unlabeled data by minimizing the divergence in their statistical characteristics within the embedding space, thereby enhancing the reliability of pseudo-labels and the model’s generalization capability. Extensive experiments on multiple standard image classification benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, confirming the effectiveness and novelty of incorporating feature distribution alignment to improve semi-supervised learning performance.