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

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.