Webly Supervised Multi-Label Recognition: Evaluation Benchmark and Dual-Branch Multi-Label Contrastive Learning

Large-scale multi-label text classification assigns a small subset of relevant labels to each document from a vocabulary containing thousands or tens of thousands of candidate labels. Although pretrained language models have improved semantic text representations, most representation-based approaches center their prediction pipelines on a primary encoder or combine auxiliary features within a single ranker. The complementarity between heterogeneous language models therefore remains insufficiently explored. We propose DualMLC, a dual-branch framework that processes the same document through an autoregressive decoder-only language model and a bidirectional encoder. Each branch maintains its own representation pathway and independently estimates relevance scores over the shared label space. DualMLC combines the two score vectors through late logit fusion, allowing shared evidence to reinforce relevant labels and branch-specific evidence to compensate for limitations in the other branch's representation. DualMLC achieves state-of-the-art results on three widely used large-scale multi-label text classification benchmarks. Ablation results further confirm that integrating the heterogeneous predictors produces stronger rankings than either branch alone. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/huiyegit/DualMLC.

Multi-label image classification (MLIC), a fundamental task in computer vision, focuses on identifying multiple objects or concepts within an image, underpinning numerous read-world applications, such as autonomous driving, disease diagnosis, recommendation system, and mobile service robot. Over the past decade, deep learning paradigms based on convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and Transformers have significantly advanced this field, owing to their powerful capability in visual representation and relationship modeling. These advances have markedly improved the robustness, scalability, and generalization ability of MLIC models across diverse datasets and application domains. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the deep learning-based literature on MLIC. Concretely, we first revisit the background, including problem definition, datasets, backbones and evaluation metrics. Next, we develop a plausible taxonomy for the deep learning-based MLIC approaches, organizing them into six groups: region-oriented methods, label-oriented methods, architecture-oriented methods, representation-oriented methods, learning-oriented methods, and data-oriented methods. Finally, we provide an insightful exposition of the underlying learning game in MLIC and its implications for other vision domains, and we empirically summarize the key challenges and research directions in MLIC while outlining promising avenues for future development. We believe this survey offers the research community a holistic and systematic perspective on MLIC, thereby facilitating subsequent exploration and innovation in this field and beyond.

Understanding multi-label images remains a challenging task in computer vision. With the rapid progress of vision-language multimodal learning, vision-language models (VLMs) enable zero-shot recognition without labeled data. However, due to their intrinsic design, these models often prioritize the most iconic object and omit other contextual positives. This intrinsic bias conflicts with the nature of multi-label learning, thereby limiting their applicability. In this work, we propose an unsupervised framework that adapts VLMs from iconic recognition toward inclusive understanding, enabling label-free multi-label image recognition. Our approach consists of two key stages, cutting'' and sewing'': In the cutting stage, we present the multi-sampling response estimator to prevent the model from concentrating only on one single object. In the second sewing stage, the multi-object blend adaptation is introduced to adjust the labels to better conform to the multi-label distribution while preserving the intrinsic characteristics of the original model within only one epoch. Extensive experiments show that our framework significantly outperforms existing unsupervised approaches on four public datasets, even surpassing several representative weakly supervised baselines. These results demonstrate the potential of adapting pre-trained VLMs for more comprehensive visual understanding without manual annotations. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/iCVTEAM/TailorCLIP.