Visual–Label Alignment and Attribute-Aware Prompt for Multi-Label Image Recognition with Partial Labels

Abstract

The problem of Multi-Label Image Recognition with Partial Labels (MLIR-PL) is a significant challenge in computer vision, primarily due to the scarcity and high cost of complete annotations. Recent advances have leveraged large-scale vision-language models, such as CLIP, to establish rich correspondences between images and their labels, thereby improving the MLIR-PL performance. However, the existing CLIP-based methods have not fully exploited fine-grained local image features to mitigate interference from semantically irrelevant regions. Moreover, many studies have oversimplified the use of prompt contexts, limiting their ability to comprehensively capture the multi-dimensional attributes of categories. To address these limitations, this article proposes a novel MLIR-PL model with Visual–Label Alignment and Attribute-Aware Prompt (VA \({}^{3}\) P), which sufficiently harnesses the capabilities of large-scale pre-trained vision-language models. In the model, we design a Visual–Label Alignment module to establish a mapping between local image features and category text representations, conspicuously reducing the interference from irrelevant regions. Additionally, our Attribute-Aware Prompt module offers diverse contextual information, providing a more comprehensive representation of the category’s attributes. Extensive experimental results on the COCO 2014 and VOC 2007 datasets, compared with multiple state-of-the-art methods, demonstrate that our model achieves the best performance comprehensively, verifying the advantages of the proposed model in the MLIR-PL task.