# SSPA: Split-and-Synthesize Prompting with Gated Alignments for Multi-Label Image Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.20920 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20920/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 109 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [Asymmetric Loss For Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14119/) (2020)
- [RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11029/) (2023)
- [AID: A Benchmark Dataset for Performance Evaluation of Aerial Scene Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05167/) (2016)
- [Prompt-aligned Gradient for Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14865/) (2022)
- [Visual Classification via Description from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07183/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Learning Semantic-Specific Graph Representation for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07325/) (2019)
- [Self-correcting LLM-controlled Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16090/) (2023)
- [DualCoOp: Fast Adaptation to Multi-Label Recognition with Limited Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09541/) (2022)
- [Improving Text-to-Image Consistency via Automatic Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17804/) (2024)
- [HydraPlus-Net: Attentive Deep Features for Pedestrian Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.09930/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [SPARC: Score Prompting and Adaptive Fusion for Zero-Shot Multi-Label Recognition in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16911/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Multi-Label Image Classification With Deep Learning: Taxonomy, Challenge, and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00839/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-label image recognition is a fundamental task in computer vision. Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made notable advancements in this area. However, previous methods fail to effectively leverage the rich knowledge in language models and often incorporate label semantics into visual features unidirectionally. To overcome these problems, we propose a Split-and-Synthesize Prompting with Gated Alignments (SSPA) framework to amplify the potential of VLMs. Specifically, we develop an in-context learning approach to associate the inherent knowledge from LLMs. Then we propose a novel Split-and-Synthesize Prompting (SSP) strategy to first model the generic knowledge and downstream label semantics individually and then aggregate them carefully through the quaternion network. Moreover, we present Gated Dual-Modal Alignments (GDMA) to bidirectionally interact visual and linguistic modalities while eliminating redundant cross-modal information, enabling more efficient region-level alignments. Rather than making the final prediction by a sharp manner in previous works, we propose a soft aggregator to jointly consider results from all image regions. With the help of flexible prompting and gated alignments, SSPA is generalizable to specific domains. Extensive experiments on nine datasets from three domains (i.e., natural, pedestrian attributes and remote sensing) demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SSPA. Further analyses verify the effectiveness of SSP and the interpretability of GDMA. The code will be made public.