# DART: Dual Adaptive Refinement Transfer for Open-Vocabulary Multi-Label Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05585 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05585/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03211/) (2019)
- [The Open Images Dataset V4: Unified image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00982/) (2018)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [VLMo: Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training with Mixture-of-Modality-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02358/) (2021)
- [Multi-Label Image Recognition with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03582/) (2019)
- [Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14940/) (2022)
- [Open-Vocabulary DETR with Conditional Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11876/) (2022)
- [Learning Semantic-Specific Graph Representation for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07325/) (2019)
- [Learning From Noisy Large-Scale Datasets With Minimal Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01619/) (2017)
- [Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation via Robust Cross-Modal Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12698/) (2021)
- [Multi-label Image Recognition by Recurrently Discovering Attentional Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02816/) (2017)
- [Multi-Label Zero-Shot Learning with Structured Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06526/) (2017)
- [Knowledge-Guided Multi-Label Few-Shot Learning for General Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09450/) (2020)
- [CNN: Single-label to Multi-label](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.5726/) (2014)
- [RouterEval: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Routing LLMs to Explore Model-level Scaling Up in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10657/) (2025)
- [Learning to Discover Multi-Class Attentional Regions for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01755/) (2020)
- [Deep Convolutional Ranking for Multilabel Image Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4894/) (2013)
- [Cross-Domain Facial Expression Recognition: A Unified Evaluation Benchmark and Adversarial Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00923/) (2020)
- [Discriminative Region-based Multi-Label Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09301/) (2021)

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

- [Robust Egocentric Referring Video Object Segmentation via Dual-Modal Causal Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24323/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-Vocabulary Multi-Label Recognition (OV-MLR) aims to identify multiple seen and unseen object categories within an image, requiring both precise intra-class localization to pinpoint objects and effective inter-class reasoning to model complex category dependencies. While Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models offer a strong open-vocabulary foundation, they often struggle with fine-grained localization under weak supervision and typically fail to explicitly leverage structured relational knowledge beyond basic semantics, limiting performance especially for unseen classes. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Dual Adaptive Refinement Transfer (DART) framework. DART enhances a frozen VLP backbone via two synergistic adaptive modules. For intra-class refinement, an Adaptive Refinement Module (ARM) refines patch features adaptively, coupled with a novel Weakly Supervised Patch Selecting (WPS) loss that enables discriminative localization using only image-level labels. Concurrently, for inter-class transfer, an Adaptive Transfer Module (ATM) leverages a Class Relationship Graph (CRG), constructed using structured knowledge mined from a Large Language Model (LLM), and employs graph attention network to adaptively transfer relational information between class representations. DART is the first framework, to our knowledge, to explicitly integrate external LLM-derived relational knowledge for adaptive inter-class transfer while simultaneously performing adaptive intra-class refinement under weak supervision for OV-MLR. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our DART achieves new state-of-the-art performance, validating its effectiveness.