# Hard-Aware Fashion Attribute Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10839 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10839/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Smart Fashion: A Review of AI Applications in the Fashion & Apparel Industry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00905/) (2021)
- [FashionSearchNet-v2: Learning Attribute Representations with Localization for Image Retrieval with Attribute Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14145/) (2021)
- [Design-time Fashion Popularity Forecasting in VR Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07187/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fashion attribute classification is of great importance to many high-level tasks such as fashion item search, fashion trend analysis, fashion recommendation, etc. The task is challenging due to the extremely imbalanced data distribution, particularly the attributes with only a few positive samples. In this paper, we introduce a hard-aware pipeline to make full use of "hard" samples/attributes. We first propose Hard-Aware BackPropagation (HABP) to efficiently and adaptively focus on training "hard" data. Then for the identified hard labels, we propose to synthesize more complementary samples for training. To stabilize training, we extend semi-supervised GAN by directly deactivating outputs for synthetic complementary samples (Deact). In general, our method is more effective in addressing "hard" cases. HABP weights more on "hard" samples. For "hard" attributes with insufficient training data, Deact brings more stable synthetic samples for training and further improve the performance. Our method is verified on large scale fashion dataset, outperforming other state-of-the-art without any additional supervisions.