SemiVisBooster: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning for Fine-Grained Classification through Pseudo-Label Semantic Guidance

Deep learning models rely on large-scale labeled datasets, but collecting such data is expensive and time-consuming. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) mitigates this issue by learning from a small set of labeled samples along with a large pool of unlabeled data. However, existing SSL methods struggle with fine-grained classification when dealing with visually similar classes, as they rely solely on visual features and ignore the semantic information within label names. This paper introduces SemiVisBooster, an SSL enhancement approach that utilizes semantic information from label names to guide visual feature learning, addressing the challenges of fine-grained classification. By aligning text embeddings from label names with visual features, our method helps the model capture subtle visual distinctions that purely visual representations may overlook. To enhance robustness, we propose two key components: (1) text embedding de-similarity (TEDS) to reduce confusion caused by similar text embeddings across different class names, and (2) class-aware visual-text alignment loss to accurately define positive and negative pairs during visualtext alignment. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the latest SSL benchmarks. Additionally, on the challenging Food-101 dataset, which contains many visually similar classes and uses only 404 labeled images, our approach improves performance by approximately 13.6% over the second-best method. Code is available at SemiVis-Booster