# Classifier-guided CLIP Distillation for Unsupervised Multi-label Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16873 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16873/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Learning of Visual Representations from Uncurated Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06430/) (2019)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
- [Asymmetric Loss For Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14119/) (2020)
- [CLIP-NeRF: Text-and-Image Driven Manipulation of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05139/) (2021)
- [VQGAN-CLIP: Open Domain Image Generation and Editing with Natural Language Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08583/) (2022)
- [Simple but Effective: CLIP Embeddings for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09888/) (2021)
- [Learning a Deep ConvNet for Multi-label Classification with Partial Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09720/) (2019)
- [GEN-VLKT: Simplify Association and Enhance Interaction Understanding for HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13954/) (2022)
- [Presence-Only Geographical Priors for Fine-Grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05272/) (2019)
- [Multi-Label Learning from Single Positive Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09708/) (2021)
- [Seeing through the Human Reporting Bias: Visual Classifiers from Noisy Human-Centric Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.06974/) (2015)
- [Structured Semantic Transfer for Multi-Label Recognition with Partial Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10941/) (2021)
- [CDUL: CLIP-Driven Unsupervised Learning for Multi-Label Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16634/) (2023)
- [Large Loss Matters in Weakly Supervised Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03740/) (2022)
- [Label Noise Types and Their Effects on Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10471/) (2020)
- [Semantic-Aware Representation Blending for Multi-Label Image Recognition with Partial Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02172/) (2022)
- [Acknowledging the Unknown for Multi-label Learning with Single Positive Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16219/) (2022)
- [DualCoOp++: Fast and Effective Adaptation to Multi-Label Recognition with Limited Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01890/) (2023)

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

- [[CLS] is Not Enough: Multi-Label Recognition via Patch-Level Inference and Adaptive Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25821/) (2026)
- [FedMPT: Federated Multi-label Prompt Tuning of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28347/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-label classification is crucial for comprehensive image understanding, yet acquiring accurate annotations is challenging and costly. To address this, a recent study suggests exploiting unsupervised multi-label classification leveraging CLIP, a powerful vision-language model. Despite CLIP's proficiency, it suffers from view-dependent predictions and inherent bias, limiting its effectiveness. We propose a novel method that addresses these issues by leveraging multiple views near target objects, guided by Class Activation Mapping (CAM) of the classifier, and debiasing pseudo-labels derived from CLIP predictions. Our Classifier-guided CLIP Distillation (CCD) enables selecting multiple local views without extra labels and debiasing predictions to enhance classification performance. Experimental results validate our method's superiority over existing techniques across diverse datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/k0u-id/CCD.