PU-BENCH: A UNIFIED BENCHMARK FOR RIGOROUS AND REPRODUCIBLE PU LEARNING

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission10731 Authors

Keywords: PU learning, semi-supervised leaning, benchmark

Abstract: Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning, a challenging paradigm for training binary classifiers from only positive and unlabeled samples, is fundamental to many applications. While numerous PU learning methods have been proposed, the research is systematically hindered by the lack of a standardized and comprehensive benchmark for rigorous evaluation. Inconsistent data generation, disparate experimental settings, and divergent metrics have led to irreproducible findings and unsubstantiated performance claims. To address this foundational challenge, we introduce \textbf{PU-Bench}, the first unified open-source benchmark for PU learning. PU-Bench provides: 1) a unified data generation pipeline to ensure consistent input across configurable sampling schemes, label ratios and labeling mechanisms ; 2) an integrated framework of 16 state-of-the-art PU methods; and 3) standardized protocols for reproducible assessment. Through a large-scale empirical study on 8 diverse datasets (\textbf{2,560 }evaluations in total), PU-Bench reveals a complex while intuitional performance landscape, uncovering critical trade-offs between effectiveness and efficiency, and those of robustness and label frequency and selection bias. It is anticipated to serve as a foundational resource to catalyze reproducible, rigorous, and impactful research in the PU learning community.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 10731