Category-wise Fine-Tuning: Resisting Incorrect Pseudo-Labels in
  Multi-Label Image Classification with Partial Labels
Chak Fong Chong Xinyi Fang Jielong Guo Yapeng Wang Wei Ke Chan-Tong Lam Sio-Kei Im
Large-scale image datasets are often partially labeled, where only a few
categories' labels are known for each image. Assigning pseudo-labels to unknown
labels to gain additional training signals has become prevalent for training
deep classification models. However, some pseudo-labels are inevitably
incorrect, leading to a notable decline in the model classification
performance. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Category-wise
Fine-Tuning (CFT), aiming to reduce model inaccuracies caused by the wrong
pseudo-labels. In particular, CFT employs known labels without pseudo-labels to
fine-tune the logistic regressions of trained models individually to calibrate
each category's model predictions. Genetic Algorithm, seldom used for training
deep models, is also utilized in CFT to maximize the classification performance
directly. CFT is applied to well-trained models, unlike most existing methods
that train models from scratch. Hence, CFT is general and compatible with
models trained with different methods and schemes, as demonstrated through
extensive experiments. CFT requires only a few seconds for each category for
calibration with consumer-grade GPUs. We achieve state-of-the-art results on
three benchmarking datasets, including the CheXpert chest X-ray competition
dataset (ensemble mAUC 93.33%, single model 91.82%), partially labeled MS-COCO
(average mAP 83.69%), and Open Image V3 (mAP 85.31%), outperforming the
previous bests by 0.28%, 2.21%, 2.50%, and 0.91%, respectively. The single
model on CheXpert has been officially evaluated by the competition server,
endorsing the correctness of the result. The outstanding results and
generalizability indicate that CFT could be substantial and prevalent for
classification model development. Code is available at:
https://github.com/maxium0526/category-wise-fine-tuning.