# Category-Prompt Refined Feature Learning for Long-Tailed Multi-Label Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08125 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08125/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07413/) (2019)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [A systematic study of the class imbalance problem in convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05381/) (2017)
- [Deep Long-Tailed Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04596/) (2021)
- [BBN: Bilateral-Branch Network with Cumulative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02413/) (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)
- [What is the Effect of Importance Weighting in Deep Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03372/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Distribution-Balanced Loss for Multi-Label Classification in Long-Tailed Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09654/) (2020)
- [Learning Semantic-Specific Graph Representation for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07325/) (2019)
- [Relay Backpropagation for Effective Learning of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.05830/) (2015)
- [LPT: Long-tailed Prompt Tuning for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01033/) (2022)
- [VL-LTR: Learning Class-wise Visual-Linguistic Representation for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13579/) (2021)
- [A Simple Long-Tailed Recognition Baseline via Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14745/) (2021)
- [VT-CLIP: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Visual-guided Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02399/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary Multi-Label Classification via Multi-Modal Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01887/) (2022)
- [Order-Free RNN with Visual Attention for Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05495/) (2017)
- [MlTr: Multi-label Classification with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06195/) (2021)
- [Learning in Imperfect Environment: Multi-Label Classification with Long-Tailed Distribution and Partial Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10539/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Dual-View Alignment Learning with Hierarchical-Prompt for Class-Imbalance Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17747/) (2025)
- [Unleashing the Power of Vision-Language Models for Long-Tailed Multi-Label Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20641/) (2025)
- [MUSE: Harnessing Precise and Diverse Semantics for Few-Shot Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20873/) (2026)
- [Semantic Relation-Enhanced CLIP Adapter for Domain Adaptive Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21808/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Multi-Label Image Classification With Deep Learning: Taxonomy, Challenge, and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00839/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-world data consistently exhibits a long-tailed distribution, often spanning multiple categories. This complexity underscores the challenge of content comprehension, particularly in scenarios requiring Long-Tailed Multi-Label image Classification (LTMLC). In such contexts, imbalanced data distribution and multi-object recognition pose significant hurdles. To address this issue, we propose a novel and effective approach for LTMLC, termed Category-Prompt Refined Feature Learning (CPRFL), utilizing semantic correlations between different categories and decoupling category-specific visual representations for each category. Specifically, CPRFL initializes category-prompts from the pretrained CLIP's embeddings and decouples category-specific visual representations through interaction with visual features, thereby facilitating the establishment of semantic correlations between the head and tail classes. To mitigate the visual-semantic domain bias, we design a progressive Dual-Path Back-Propagation mechanism to refine the prompts by progressively incorporating context-related visual information into prompts. Simultaneously, the refinement process facilitates the progressive purification of the category-specific visual representations under the guidance of the refined prompts. Furthermore, taking into account the negative-positive sample imbalance, we adopt the Asymmetric Loss as our optimization objective to suppress negative samples across all classes and potentially enhance the head-to-tail recognition performance. We validate the effectiveness of our method on two LTMLC benchmarks and extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our work over baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/jiexuanyan/CPRFL.