# SpliceMix: A Cross-scale and Semantic Blending Augmentation Strategy for Multi-label Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.15200 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15200/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (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)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10972/) (2021)
- [Decoupled Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08679/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Puzzle Mix: Exploiting Saliency and Local Statistics for Optimal Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06962/) (2020)
- [Neural Architecture Search without Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04647/) (2020)
- [Fixing the train-test resolution discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06423/) (2019)
- [ClassMix: Segmentation-Based Data Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07936/) (2020)
- [CNN-RNN: A Unified Framework for Multi-label Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04573/) (2016)
- [Recurrent Neural Network Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.2329/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Correlative and Discriminative Label Grouping for Multi-Label Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09990/) (2025)
- [The Demon is in Ambiguity: Revisiting Situation Recognition with Single Positive Multi-Label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21816/) (2025)
- [Hyperbolic Structured Classification for Robust Single Positive Multi-label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15296/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Multi-Label Image Classification With Deep Learning: Taxonomy, Challenge, and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00839/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, Mix-style data augmentation methods (e.g., Mixup and CutMix) have shown promising performance in various visual tasks. However, these methods are primarily designed for single-label images, ignoring the considerable discrepancies between single- and multi-label images, i.e., a multi-label image involves multiple co-occurred categories and fickle object scales. On the other hand, previous multi-label image classification (MLIC) methods tend to design elaborate models, bringing expensive computation. In this paper, we introduce a simple but effective augmentation strategy for multi-label image classification, namely SpliceMix. The "splice" in our method is two-fold: 1) Each mixed image is a splice of several downsampled images in the form of a grid, where the semantics of images attending to mixing are blended without object deficiencies for alleviating co-occurred bias; 2) We splice mixed images and the original mini-batch to form a new SpliceMixed mini-batch, which allows an image with different scales to contribute to training together. Furthermore, such splice in our SpliceMixed mini-batch enables interactions between mixed images and original regular images. We also offer a simple and non-parametric extension based on consistency learning (SpliceMix-CL) to show the flexible extensibility of our SpliceMix. Extensive experiments on various tasks demonstrate that only using SpliceMix with a baseline model (e.g., ResNet) achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the generalizability of our SpliceMix is further validated by the improvements in current MLIC methods when married with our SpliceMix. The code is available at https://github.com/zuiran/SpliceMix.