Classifier-guided CLIP Distillation for Unsupervised Multi-label Classification
Dongseob Kim, Hyunjung Shim
Abstract
Multi-label classification is crucial for comprehensive image understanding, yet acquiring accurate annotations is challenging and costly. To address this, a recent study suggests exploiting unsupervised multi-label classification leveraging CLIP, a powerful vision-language model. Despite CLIP's proficiency, it suffers from view-dependent predictions and inherent bias, limiting its effectiveness. We propose a novel method that addresses these issues by leveraging multiple views near target objects, guided by Class Activation Mapping (CAM) of the classifier, and debiasing pseudo-labels derived from CLIP predictions. Our Classifier-guided CLIP Distillation (CCD) enables selecting multiple local views without extra labels and debiasing predictions to enhance classification performance. Experimental results validate our method's superiority over existing techniques across diverse datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/k0u-id/CCD .
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Cited by top-tier papers2
- [CLS] is Not Enough: Multi-Label Recognition via Patch-Level Inference and Adaptive AggregationAkang Wang, Xili Deng, Zhanxuan Hu, Yi Zhao et al.ICML 2026 · 1 citation
- FedMPT: Federated Multi-Label Prompt Tuning of Vision-Language ModelsXucong Wang, Pengkun Wang, Zhe Zhao, Liheng Yu et al.CVPR 2026
Builds on21
- Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language SupervisionAlec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy, Aditya Ramesh et al.ICML 2021 · 47,906 citations
- Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text SupervisionChao Jia, Yinfei Yang, Ye Xia, Yi-Ting Chen et al.ICML 2021 · 5,401 citations
- Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge DistillationXiuye Gu, Tsung-Yi Lin, Weicheng Kuo, Yin CuiICLR 2022 · 1,274 citations
- Asymmetric Loss For Multi-Label ClassificationTal Ridnik, Emanuel Ben Baruch, Nadav Zamir, Asaf Noy et al.ICCV 2021 · 778 citations
- DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware PromptingYongming Rao, Wenliang Zhao, Guangyi Chen, Yansong Tang et al.CVPR 2022 · 527 citations
Related papers
- CDUL: CLIP-Driven Unsupervised Learning for Multi-Label Image ClassificationRabab Abdelfattah, Qing Guo, Xiaoguang Li, Xiaofeng Wang et al.ICCV 2023 · 58 citations
- KAID: Knowledge-Aware Interactive Distillation for Vision-Language ModelsDa Zhang, Feiyu Wang, Bingyu Li, Zhiyuan Zhao et al.ACM MM 2025 · 10 citations
- Pre-Trained Vision-Language Models as Noisy Partial AnnotatorsQian-Wei Wang, Yuqiu Xie, Letian Zhang, Zimo Liu et al.AAAI 2025 · 3 citations
- Unbiased Region-Language Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Dense PredictionYunheng Li, Yuxuan Li, Quan-Sheng Zeng, Wenhai Wang et al.ICCV 2025 · 3 citations
- ATAS: Any-to-Any Self-Distillation for Enhanced Open-Vocabulary Dense PredictionJuan Yeo, Soonwoo Cha, Jiwoo Song, Hyunbin Jin et al.ICCV 2025
