# Multi-label Iterated Learning for Image Classification with Label Ambiguity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.12172 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12172/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [In Search of Lost Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01434/) (2020)
- [A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05394/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00688/) (2020)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)
- [MentorNet: Learning Data-Driven Curriculum for Very Deep Neural Networks on Corrupted Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05055/) (2017)
- [Born Again Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04770/) (2018)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [Do Deep Nets Really Need to be Deep?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6184/) (2013)
- [Class-incremental learning: survey and performance evaluation on image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15277/) (2020)
- [Bag of Tricks for Image Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01187/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Learning with Neighbor Consistency for Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02200/) (2022)
- [Natural Language-Assisted Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12080/) (2023)
- [Is one annotation enough? A data-centric image classification benchmark for noisy and ambiguous label estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06214/) (2022)
- [CMW-Net: Learning a Class-Aware Sample Weighting Mapping for Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05613/) (2022)
- [Improving Image Recognition by Retrieving from Web-Scale Image-Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05173/) (2023)
- [Eliciting the Priors of Large Language Models using Iterated In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01860/) (2024)
- [Iterated Learning Improves Compositionality in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02145/) (2024)
- [Improving Compositional Generalization Using Iterated Learning and Simplicial Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18777/) (2023)
- [Bridging the Gap between Model Explanations in Partially Annotated Multi-label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01804/) (2023)
- [CODIS: Benchmarking Context-Dependent Visual Comprehension for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13607/) (2024)
- [lpNTK: Better Generalisation with Less Data via Sample Interaction During Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08808/) (2024)
- [CAPro: Webly Supervised Learning with Cross-Modality Aligned Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09761/) (2023)
- [PVLR: Prompt-driven Visual-Linguistic Representation Learning for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17881/) (2024)
- [SSPA: Split-and-Synthesize Prompting with Gated Alignments for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20920/) (2024)
- [A Robust Multilabel Method Integrating Rule-based Transparent Model, Soft Label Correlation Learning and Label Noise Resistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03283/) (2023)
- [Hyper-Spectral Imaging for Overlapping Plastic Flakes Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12350/) (2022)
- [An Attention-based Representation Distillation Baseline for Multi-Label Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14249/) (2024)
- [Learning to vary: Teaching LMs to reproduce human linguistic variability in next-word prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17794/) (2025)
- [Adapting Dense Vision-Language Relationships for Multi-label Classification with Partial Label](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22313/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transfer learning from large-scale pre-trained models has become essential for many computer vision tasks. Recent studies have shown that datasets like ImageNet are weakly labeled since images with multiple object classes present are assigned a single label. This ambiguity biases models towards a single prediction, which could result in the suppression of classes that tend to co-occur in the data. Inspired by language emergence literature, we propose multi-label iterated learning (MILe) to incorporate the inductive biases of multi-label learning from single labels using the framework of iterated learning. MILe is a simple yet effective procedure that builds a multi-label description of the image by propagating binary predictions through successive generations of teacher and student networks with a learning bottleneck. Experiments show that our approach exhibits systematic benefits on ImageNet accuracy as well as ReaL F1 score, which indicates that MILe deals better with label ambiguity than the standard training procedure, even when fine-tuning from self-supervised weights. We also show that MILe is effective reducing label noise, achieving state-of-the-art performance on real-world large-scale noisy data such as WebVision. Furthermore, MILe improves performance in class incremental settings such as IIRC and it is robust to distribution shifts. Code: https://github.com/rajeswar18/MILe