Contrastively enforcing distinctiveness for multi-label image classification

Abstract

Recently, as an effective way of learning latent representations, contrastive learning has been increasingly popular and successful in various domains. The success of contrastive learning in single-label classifications motivates us to leverage this learning framework to enhance distinctiveness for better performance in multi-label image classification. In this paper, we show that a direct application of contrastive learning can hardly improve in multi-label cases. Accordingly, we propose a novel framework for multi-label classification with contrastive learning in a fully supervised setting, which learns multiple representations of an image under the context of different labels. This introduces a simple yet intuitive adaption of contrastive learning into our model to boost its performance in multi-label image classification. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in the comparison with the advanced methods in multi-label classification.