# BoMD: Bag of Multi-label Descriptors for Noisy Chest X-ray Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.01937 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01937/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07394/) (2020)
- [Making Deep Neural Networks Robust to Label Noise: a Loss Correction Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03683/) (2016)
- [MentorNet: Learning Data-Driven Curriculum for Very Deep Neural Networks on Corrupted Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05055/) (2017)
- [Symmetric Cross Entropy for Robust Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06112/) (2019)
- [ClinicalBERT: Modeling Clinical Notes and Predicting Hospital Readmission](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05342/) (2019)
- [CheXNet: Radiologist-Level Pneumonia Detection on Chest X-Rays with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05225/) (2017)
- [Early-Learning Regularization Prevents Memorization of Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00151/) (2020)
- [Asymmetric Loss For Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14119/) (2020)
- [PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07441/) (2019)
- [Transfer Learning in Biomedical Natural Language Processing: An Evaluation of BERT and ELMo on Ten Benchmarking Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05474/) (2019)
- [Normalized Loss Functions for Deep Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13554/) (2020)
- [Decoupling "when to update" from "how to update"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02613/) (2017)
- [Does label smoothing mitigate label noise?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02819/) (2020)
- [Dual T: Reducing Estimation Error for Transition Matrix in Label-noise Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07805/) (2020)
- [TorchXRayVision: A library of chest X-ray datasets and models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00595/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [FairDomain: Achieving Fairness in Cross-Domain Medical Image Segmentation and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08813/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Medical Images with a Memory-augmented Multi-level Cross-attentional Masked Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11725/) (2022)
- [Deep learning with noisy labels in medical prediction problems: a scoping review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13111/) (2024)
- [Taming Vision-Language Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18378/) (2025)
- [Pre-training on High Definition X-ray Images: An Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17926/) (2024)
- [Learning to Complement with Multiple Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13172/) (2023)
- [Cross- and Intra-image Prototypical Learning for Multi-label Disease Diagnosis and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04607/) (2024)
- [Rep-GLS: Report-Guided Generalized Label Smoothing for Robust Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02495/) (2025)
- [SLT: Robust Quantum Neural Networks for Noisy-Label Medical Image Classification via Supermartingale-based Label Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16293/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning methods have shown outstanding classification accuracy in medical imaging problems, which is largely attributed to the availability of large-scale datasets manually annotated with clean labels. However, given the high cost of such manual annotation, new medical imaging classification problems may need to rely on machine-generated noisy labels extracted from radiology reports. Indeed, many Chest X-ray (CXR) classifiers have already been modelled from datasets with noisy labels, but their training procedure is in general not robust to noisy-label samples, leading to sub-optimal models. Furthermore, CXR datasets are mostly multi-label, so current noisy-label learning methods designed for multi-class problems cannot be easily adapted. In this paper, we propose a new method designed for the noisy multi-label CXR learning, which detects and smoothly re-labels samples from the dataset, which is then used to train common multi-label classifiers. The proposed method optimises a bag of multi-label descriptors (BoMD) to promote their similarity with the semantic descriptors produced by BERT models from the multi-label image annotation. Our experiments on diverse noisy multi-label training sets and clean testing sets show that our model has state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness in many CXR multi-label classification benchmarks.