Two-Way Multi-Label Loss
Authors: Takumi Kobayashi

A natural image frequently contains multiple classification targets, accordingly providing multiple class labels rather than a single label per image. While the single-label classification is effectively addressed by applying a softmax cross-entropy loss, the multi-label task is tackled mainly in a binary cross-entropy (BCE) framework. In contrast to the softmax loss, the BCE loss involves issues regarding imbalance as multiple classes are decomposed into a bunch of binary classifications; recent works improve the BCE loss to cope with the issue by means of weighting. In this paper, we propose a multi-label loss by bridging a gap between the softmax loss and the multi-label scenario. The proposed loss function is formulated on the basis of relative comparison among classes which also enables us to further improve discriminative power of features by enhancing classification margin. The loss function is so flexible as to be applicable to a multi-label setting in two ways for discriminating classes as well as samples. In the experiments on multi-label classification, the proposed method exhibits competitive performance to the other multi-label losses, and it also provides transferrable features on single-label ImageNet training. Codes are available at https://github.com/tk1980/TwowayMultiLabelLoss.