# HELM: Hierarchical and Explicit Label Modeling with Graph Learning for Multi-Label Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11783 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11783/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [AID: A Benchmark Dataset for Performance Evaluation of Aerial Scene Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05167/) (2016)
- [Multi-Label Image Recognition with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03582/) (2019)
- [Coherent Hierarchical Multi-Label Classification Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10151/) (2020)
- [MLRSNet: A Multi-label High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Dataset for Semantic Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00243/) (2020)
- [Use All The Labels: A Hierarchical Multi-Label Contrastive Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13207/) (2022)
- [B-CNN: Branch Convolutional Neural Network for Hierarchical Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.09890/) (2017)
- [Hierarchical Taxonomy-Aware and Attentional Graph Capsule RCNNs for Large-Scale Multi-Label Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04898/) (2019)
- [Label Relation Graphs Enhanced Hierarchical Residual Network for Hierarchical Multi-Granularity Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03194/) (2022)
- [Relation Network for Multi-label Aerial Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07274/) (2019)
- [HGCLIP: Exploring Vision-Language Models with Graph Representations for Hierarchical Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14064/) (2023)
- [Recurrently Exploring Class-wise Attention in A Hybrid Convolutional and Bidirectional LSTM Network for Multi-label Aerial Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11245/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hierarchical multi-label classification (HMLC) is essential for modeling complex label dependencies in remote sensing. Existing methods, however, struggle with multi-path hierarchies where instances belong to multiple branches, and they rarely exploit unlabeled data. We introduce HELM (textitHierarchical and Explicit Label Modeling), a novel framework that overcomes these limitations. HELM: (i) uses hierarchy-specific class tokens within a Vision Transformer to capture nuanced label interactions; (ii) employs graph convolutional networks to explicitly encode the hierarchical structure and generate hierarchy-aware embeddings; and (iii) integrates a self-supervised branch to effectively leverage unlabeled imagery. We perform a comprehensive evaluation on four remote sensing image (RSI) datasets (UCM, AID, DFC-15, MLRSNet). HELM achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming strong baselines in both supervised and semi-supervised settings, demonstrating particular strength in low-label scenarios.