Learning Category Correlations for Multi-label Image Recognition with Graph Networks

Multi-label image recognition is a task that predicts a set of object labels in an image. As the objects co-occur in the physical world, it is desirable to model label dependencies. Previous existing methods resort to either recurrent networks or pre-defined label correlation graphs for this purpose. In this paper, instead of using a pre-defined graph which is inflexible and may be sub-optimal for multi-label classification, we propose the A-GCN, which leverages the popular Graph Convolutional Networks with an Adaptive label correlation graph to model label dependencies. Specifically, we introduce a plug-and-play Label Graph (LG) module to learn label correlations with word embeddings, and then utilize traditional GCN to map this graph into label-dependent object classifiers which are further applied to image features. The basic LG module incorporates two 1x1 convolutional layers and uses the dot product to generate label graphs. In addition, we propose a sparse correlation constraint to enhance the LG module and also explore different LG architectures. We validate our method on two diverse multi-label datasets: MS-COCO and Fashion550K. Experimental results show that our A-GCN significantly improves baseline methods and achieves performance superior or comparable to the state of the art.