# Graph Attention Transformer Network for Multi-Label Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04049/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6652/) (2014)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [LINE: Large-scale Information Network Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03578/) (2015)
- [Graph Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06455/) (2019)
- [Billion-scale semi-supervised learning for image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00546/) (2019)
- [CNN-RNN: A Unified Framework for Multi-label Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04573/) (2016)
- [Query2Label: A Simple Transformer Way to Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10834/) (2021)
- [General Multi-label Image Classification with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14027/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06091/) (2021)
- [Deep Label Distribution Learning with Label Ambiguity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01731/) (2016)
- [Attention in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.02181/) (2019)
- [Learning Spatial Regularization with Image-level Supervisions for Multi-label Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05891/) (2017)
- [Multi-label Image Recognition by Recurrently Discovering Attentional Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02816/) (2017)
- [ML-Decoder: Scalable and Versatile Classification Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12933/) (2021)
- [Multi-Label Zero-Shot Learning with Structured Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06526/) (2017)
- [Knowledge-Guided Multi-Label Few-Shot Learning for General Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09450/) (2020)
- [Multi-Label Classification with Label Graph Superimposing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09243/) (2019)
- [CNN: Single-label to Multi-label](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.5726/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Deep Learning for Multi-Label Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16549/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Graph Interaction Transformer with Dynamic Token Clustering for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15020/) (2024)
- [Combining Metric Learning and Attention Heads For Accurate and Efficient Multilabel Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06585/) (2022)
- [Recoverable Privacy-Preserving Image Classification through Noise-like Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12707/) (2023)
- [Category-Adaptive Cross-Modal Semantic Refinement and Transfer for Open-Vocabulary Multi-Label Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06190/) (2024)
- [Learning Semantic-Aware Representation in Visual-Language Models for Multi-Label Recognition with Partial Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10843/) (2024)
- [Improving Multi-Label Contrastive Learning by Leveraging Label Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19145/) (2025)
- [DART: Dual Adaptive Refinement Transfer for Open-Vocabulary Multi-Label Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05585/) (2025)
- [A Consistent Lebesgue Measure for Multi-label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00324/) (2024)
- [Modeling Multi-modal Cross-interaction for Multi-label Few-shot Image Classification Based on Local Feature Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13732/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Multi-Label Image Classification With Deep Learning: Taxonomy, Challenge, and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00839/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-label classification aims to recognize multiple objects or attributes from images. However, it is challenging to learn from proper label graphs to effectively characterize such inter-label correlations or dependencies. Current methods often use the co-occurrence probability of labels based on the training set as the adjacency matrix to model this correlation, which is greatly limited by the dataset and affects the model's generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a Graph Attention Transformer Network (GATN), a general framework for multi-label image classification that can effectively mine complex inter-label relationships. First, we use the cosine similarity based on the label word embedding as the initial correlation matrix, which can represent rich semantic information. Subsequently, we design the graph attention transformer layer to transfer this adjacency matrix to adapt to the current domain. Our extensive experiments have demonstrated that our proposed methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance on three datasets.