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multi-label classification

Multi-label classification is a machine learning task where each input instance can be associated with multiple target labels simultaneously from a predefined set of categories. Unlike traditional binary and multi-class classification settings where classes are mutually exclusive and an instance is assigned to exactly one category, multi-label classification accounts for scenarios with overlapping characteristics, such as an image depicting several distinct objects, an article spanning multiple topics, or a medical record indicating concurrent diagnoses. Approaches to solving multi-label classification problems typically involve transforming the task into multiple independent binary decisions, adapting existing learning algorithms to predict label sets directly, or explicitly modeling correlations and dependencies among labels to enhance prediction performance.

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Class Re-Activation Maps for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Class Re-Activation Maps for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Zhaozheng Chen, Tan Wang, Xiongwei Wu, Xian-Sheng Hua, Hanwang Zhang, Qianru Sun

Why you should read this

Proposes ReCAM, an effective plug-and-play method that replaces binary cross-entropy with a secondary softmax cross-entropy learning stage to resolve multi-class pixel ambiguity and generate higher-quality pseudo masks for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation.

Extracting class activation maps (CAM) is arguably the most standard step of generating pseudo masks for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS). Yet, we find that the crux of the unsatisfactory pseudo masks is the binary cross-entropy loss (BCE) widely used in CAM. Specifically, due to the sum-over-class pooling nature of BCE, each pixel in CAM may be responsive to multiple classes co-occurring in the same receptive field. As a result, given a class, its hot CAM pixels may wrongly invade the area belonging to other classes, or the non-hot ones may be actually a part of the class. To this end, we introduce an embarrassingly simple yet surprisingly effective method: Reactivating the converged CAM with BCE by using softmax cross-entropy loss (SCE), dubbed ReCAM. Given an image, we use CAM to extract the feature pixels of each single class, and use them with the class label to learn another fully-connected layer (after the backbone) with SCE. Once converged, we extract ReCAM in the same way as in CAM. Thanks to the contrastive nature of SCE, the pixel response is disentangled into different classes and hence less mask ambiguity is expected. The evaluation on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO shows that ReCAM not only generates high-quality masks, but also supports plug-and-play in any CAM variant with little overhead. Our code is public at https://github.com/zhaozhengChen/ReCAM.

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2026-10-05

ACPL: Anti-curriculum Pseudo-labelling for Semi-supervised Medical Image Classification

ACPL: Anti-curriculum Pseudo-labelling for Semi-supervised Medical Image Classification

Fengbei Liu, Yu Tian, Yuanhong Chen, Yuyuan Liu, Vasileios Belagiannis, Gustavo Carneiro

OrganizationsAustralian Institute for Machine LearningUlm University

Why you should read this

Proposes an anti-curriculum pseudo-labelling framework that prioritizes informative unlabeled samples and ensembles neural network predictions with nearest-neighbor classifiers to outperform state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods on class-imbalanced multi-label and multi-class medical diagnosis tasks.

Effective semi-supervised learning (SSL) in medical image analysis (MIA) must address two challenges: 1) work effectively on both multi-class (e.g., lesion classification) and multi-label (e.g., multiple-disease diagnosis) problems, and 2) handle imbalanced learning (because of the high variance in disease prevalence). One strategy to explore in SSL MIA is based on the pseudo labelling strategy, but it has a few shortcomings. Pseudo-labelling has in general lower accuracy than consistency learning, it is not specifically design for both multi-class and multi-label problems, and it can be challenged by imbalanced learning. In this paper, unlike traditional methods that select confident pseudo label by threshold, we propose a new SSL algorithm, called anti-curriculum pseudo-labelling (ACPL), which introduces novel techniques to select informative unlabelled samples, improving training balance and allowing the model to work for both multi-label and multi-class problems, and to estimate pseudo labels by an accurate ensemble of classifiers (improving pseudo label accuracy). We run extensive experiments to evaluate ACPL on two public medical image classification benchmarks: Chest X-Ray14 for thorax disease multi-label classification and ISIC2018 for skin lesion multi-class classification. Our method outperforms previous SOTA SSL methods on both datasets.

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2026-09-26

Classifier chains for multi-label classification

Classifier chains for multi-label classification

Jesse Read, Bernhard Pfahringer, Geoff Holmes, Eibe Frank

OrganizationsUniversidad Carlos III de MadridUniversity of Waikato

Why you should read this

Proposes classifier chains and ensemble extensions that model label correlations in multi-label classification while retaining the computational efficiency and linear scalability of binary relevance across large datasets.

The widely known binary relevance method for multi-label classification, which considers each label as an independent binary problem, has often been overlooked in the literature due to the perceived inadequacy of not directly modelling label correlations. Most current methods invest considerable complexity to model interdependencies between labels. This paper shows that binary relevance-based methods have much to offer, and that high predictive performance can be obtained without impeding scalability to large datasets. We exemplify this with a novel classifier chains method that can model label correlations while maintaining acceptable computational complexity. We extend this approach further in an ensemble framework. An extensive empirical evaluation covers a broad range of multi-label datasets with a variety of evaluation metrics. The results illustrate the competitiveness of the chaining method against related and state-of-the-art methods, both in terms of predictive performance and time complexity.

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2026-09-14

CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison

CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison

Jeremy Irvin, Pranav Rajpurkar, Michael Ko, Yifan Yu, Silviana Ciurea-Ilcus, Chris Chute, Henrik Marklund, Behzad Haghgoo, Robyn Ball, Katie Shpanskaya, Jayne Seekins, David A. Mong, Safwan S. Halabi, Jesse K. Sandberg, Ricky Jones, David B. Larson, Curtis P. Langlotz, Bhavik N. Patel, Matthew P. Lungren, Andrew Y. Ng

OrganizationsStanford University

Why you should read this

Introduces CheXpert, a large-scale chest radiograph dataset with an automated uncertainty-aware report labeler, demonstrating how different uncertainty-handling training strategies enable deep learning models to match or exceed practicing radiologists across multiple thoracic pathologies.

Large, labeled datasets have driven deep learning methods to achieve expert-level performance on a variety of medical imaging tasks. We present CheXpert, a large dataset that contains 224,316 chest radiographs of 65,240 patients. We design a labeler to automatically detect the presence of 14 observations in radiology reports, capturing uncertainties inherent in radiograph interpretation. We investigate different approaches to using the uncertainty labels for training convolutional neural networks that output the probability of these observations given the available frontal and lateral radiographs. On a validation set of 200 chest radiographic studies which were manually annotated by 3 board-certified radiologists, we find that different uncertainty approaches are useful for different pathologies. We then evaluate our best model on a test set composed of 500 chest radiographic studies annotated by a consensus of 5 board-certified radiologists, and compare the performance of our model to that of 3 additional radiologists in the detection of 5 selected pathologies. On Cardiomegaly, Edema, and Pleural Effusion, the model ROC and PR curves lie above all 3 radiologist operating points. We release the dataset to the public as a standard benchmark to evaluate performance of chest radiograph interpretation models.¹

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2026-09-11