Pseudo Labels for Single Positive Multi-Label Learning

The cost of data annotation is a substantial impediment for multi-label image classification: in every image, every category must be labeled as present or absent. Single positive multi-label (SPML) learning is a cost-effective solution, where models are trained on a single positive label per image. Thus, SPML is a more challenging domain, since it requires dealing with missing labels. In this work, we propose a method to turn single positive data into fully-labeled data: Pseudo Multi-Labels. Basically, a teacher network is trained on single positive labels. Then, we treat the teacher model's predictions on the training data as ground-truth labels to train a student network on fully-labeled images. With this simple approach, we show that the performance achieved by the student model approaches that of a model trained on the actual fully-labeled images.

Julio Arroyo · 2023