cs.CVAug 30, 2026

ReCalMatch:Reliability-Calibrated Semantic Guidance for Semi-Supervised Fine-Grained Recognition

Authors: Yundi Hong, Hongyang He, Zheng Fang, Xuanyu Liu, Victor Sanchez

Organizations: Department of Computer Science University of Warwick Coventry, UK · Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain

Abstract

Semi-supervised fine-grained visual recognition is highly vulnerable to overconfident pseudo-label errors: visually similar categories frequently produce high-confidence yet incorrect predictions, and consistency regularization then reinforces these errors throughout training. Existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods estimate pseudo-label reliability almost entirely from the visual classifier itself---maximum probability, adaptive thresholds, or entropy---signals that remain blind to whether a predicted class is semantically compatible with the visual representation. We propose ReCalMatch, a reliability-calibrated semantic framework for semi-supervised fine-grained recognition. Rather than treating textual semantics as auxiliary supervision, ReCalMatch uses multi-aspect semantic prototypes as calibration evidence for pseudo-label learning. We construct class-conditioned semantic prototypes from class names and domain-specific semantic aspects, and measure a visual--semantic agreement score between each unlabeled embedding and its pseudo-label prototype. This agreement is combined with prediction confidence and entropy into a single reliability weight that down-weights pseudo-labels that are visually confident but semantically inconsistent. A semantic consistency term and a semantic margin regularizer further sharpen prototype separability under limited labels. Extensive experiments on CUB-200-2011, Stanford Dogs, NABirds, and iNaturalist18 show that ReCalMatch consistently improves strong SSL baselines, with the largest gains in low-label regimes where pseudo-label noise is most severe.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Apr 8, 2026

RePL: Pseudo-label Refinement for Semi-supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

Semi-supervised learning for LiDAR semantic segmentation often suffers from error propagation and confirmation bias caused by noisy pseudo-labels. To tackle this chronic issue, we introduce RePL, a novel framework that enhances pseudo-label quality by identifying and correcting potential errors in pseudo-labels through masked reconstruction, along with a dedicated training strategy. We also provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating the condition under which the pseudo-label refinement is beneficial, and empirically confirm that the condition is mild and clearly met by RePL. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes-lidarseg and SemanticKITTI datasets show that RePL improves pseudo-label quality substantially, and in consequence, achieves the state of the art in semi-supervised LiDAR semantic segmentation.
Oct 6, 2026

RBMatch: Dual-Level Class Rebalancing for Semi-Supervised Building Footprint Extraction

Accurate building footprint extraction from high-resolution remote sensing imagery is essential for urban planning, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. However, obtaining dense pixel-level annotations is costly, motivating the use of semi-supervised learning (SSL) to leverage unlabeled imagery. In remote sensing, severe foreground--background imbalance poses a particular challenge for self-training, as it can bias pseudo-label generation and the resulting unsupervised optimization toward the majority background class. We show that addressing this imbalance at only one stage is insufficient: balancing pseudo-label selection alone does not prevent background bias from re-emerging during unsupervised loss optimization, a failure mode we term imbalance leak. To address this issue, we propose RBMatch, a dual-level class-rebalancing framework that jointly regulates pseudo-label generation and unsupervised optimization. RBMatch combines a supervised learning pathway with a self-training module comprising three components: adaptive class-specific thresholding (ACT) for balanced pseudo-label selection, confidence-aware class-balanced reweighting (CACBR) for mitigating class bias in the unsupervised loss, and distribution alignment (DAL) for matching the predicted unlabeled-data distribution to the labeled-data prior. Experiments on the WHU, INRIA, and Massachusetts building footprint datasets across labeled ratios of 1%--10% show that RBMatch consistently achieves the best building IoU and F1-score among the evaluated methods. The improvement is most pronounced on the highly imbalanced Massachusetts dataset, where RBMatch improves IoU by 1.37 points over the strongest baseline at a 1% labeling ratio and is the only method to outperform the fully supervised baseline across all twelve dataset--ratio settings.
Apr 22, 2026

JEPAMatch: Geometric Representation Shaping for Semi-Supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for leveraging large amounts of unlabeled data to improve the performance of machine learning models when labeled data are scarce. Among existing approaches, methods derived from FixMatch have achieved state-of-the-art results in image classification by combining weak and strong data augmentations with confidence-based pseudo-labeling. Despite their strong empirical performance, these methods typically struggle with two critical bottlenecks: majority classes tend to dominate the learning process, which is amplified by incorrect pseudo-labels, leading to biased models. Furthermore, noisy early pseudo-labels prevent the model from forming clear decision boundaries, requiring prolonged training to learn informative representation. In this paper, we introduce a paradigm shift from conventional logical output threshold base, toward an explicit shaping of geometric representations. Our approach is inspired by the recently proposed Latent-Euclidean Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (LeJEPA), a theoretically grounded framework asserting that meaningful representations should exhibit an isotropic Gaussian structure in latent space. Building on this principle, we propose a new training objective that combines the classical semi-supervised loss used in FlexMatch, an adaptive extension of FixMatch, with a latent-space regularization term derived from LeJEPA. Our proposed approach, encourages well-structured representations while preserving the advantages of pseudo-labeling strategies. Through extensive experiments on CIFAR-100, STL-10 and Tiny-ImageNet, we demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing baselines. In addition, our method significantly accelerates the convergence, drastically reducing the overall computational cost compared to standard FixMatch-based pipelines.