arXiv · 2603.11783
HELM: Hierarchical and Explicit Label Modeling with Graph Learning for Multi-Label Image Classification
Abstract
Hierarchical multi-label classification (HMLC) is essential for modeling complex label dependencies in remote sensing. Existing methods, however, struggle with multi-path hierarchies where instances belong to multiple branches, and they rarely exploit unlabeled data. We introduce HELM (\textit{Hierarchical and Explicit Label Modeling}), a novel framework that overcomes these limitations. HELM: (i) uses hierarchy-specific class tokens within a Vision Transformer to capture nuanced label interactions; (ii) employs graph convolutional networks to explicitly encode the hierarchical structure and generate hierarchy-aware embeddings; and (iii) integrates a self-supervised branch to effectively leverage unlabeled imagery. We perform a comprehensive evaluation on four remote sensing image (RSI) datasets (UCM, AID, DFC-15, MLRSNet). HELM achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming strong baselines in both supervised and semi-supervised settings, demonstrating particular strength in low-label scenarios.
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Marjan Stoimchev, Boshko Koloski, Jurica Levatić, Dragi Kocev, Sašo Džeroski. 2026-03-12. HELM: Hierarchical and Explicit Label Modeling with Graph Learning for Multi-Label Image Classification. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11783
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