# Learning Disentangled Label Representations for Multi-label Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.01461 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01461/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05493/) (2015)
- [Gradient based sample selection for online continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08671/) (2019)
- [Asymmetric Loss For Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14119/) (2020)
- [Multi-Label Image Recognition with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03582/) (2019)
- [CNN-RNN: A Unified Framework for Multi-label Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04573/) (2016)
- [Memory Efficient Experience Replay for Streaming Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05922/) (2018)
- [General Multi-label Image Classification with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14027/) (2020)
- [Learning Semantic-Specific Graph Representation for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07325/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Person Re-identification via Multi-label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09228/) (2020)
- [The Emerging Trends of Multi-Label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11197/) (2020)
- [HydraPlus-Net: Attentive Deep Features for Pedestrian Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.09930/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Attention-Driven Dynamic Graph Convolutional Network for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02994/) (2020)
- [Multi-Label Zero-Shot Learning with Structured Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06526/) (2017)
- [Imbalanced Continual Learning with Partitioning Reservoir Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03632/) (2020)
- [Multi-Label Classification with Label Graph Superimposing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09243/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Towards Purified Multi-Label Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25653/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although various methods have been proposed for multi-label classification, most approaches still follow the feature learning mechanism of the single-label (multi-class) classification, namely, learning a shared image feature to classify multiple labels. However, we find this One-shared-Feature-for-Multiple-Labels (OFML) mechanism is not conducive to learning discriminative label features and makes the model non-robustness. For the first time, we mathematically prove that the inferiority of the OFML mechanism is that the optimal learned image feature cannot maintain high similarities with multiple classifiers simultaneously in the context of minimizing cross-entropy loss. To address the limitations of the OFML mechanism, we introduce the One-specific-Feature-for-One-Label (OFOL) mechanism and propose a novel disentangled label feature learning (DLFL) framework to learn a disentangled representation for each label. The specificity of the framework lies in a feature disentangle module, which contains learnable semantic queries and a Semantic Spatial Cross-Attention (SSCA) module. Specifically, learnable semantic queries maintain semantic consistency between different images of the same label. The SSCA module localizes the label-related spatial regions and aggregates located region features into the corresponding label feature to achieve feature disentanglement. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on eight datasets of three tasks, ie, multi-label classification, pedestrian attribute recognition, and continual multi-label learning.