Label Hierarchy Transition: Delving into Class Hierarchies to Enhance Deep Classifiers

TL;DR

This paper introduces Label Hierarchy Transition (LHT), a deep learning framework that explicitly models label hierarchy transitions to improve hierarchical classification accuracy across various datasets.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel probabilistic framework with a transition network and confusion loss to better exploit class hierarchy correlations in deep classifiers.

Findings

LHT outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.

LHT effectively encodes label hierarchy correlations.

LHT shows promising results in skin lesion diagnosis.

Abstract

Hierarchical classification aims to sort the object into a hierarchical structure of categories. For example, a bird can be categorized according to a three-level hierarchy of order, family, and species. Existing methods commonly address hierarchical classification by decoupling it into a series of multi-class classification tasks. However, such a multi-task learning strategy fails to fully exploit the correlation among various categories across different levels of the hierarchy. In this paper, we propose Label Hierarchy Transition (LHT), a unified probabilistic framework based on deep learning, to address the challenges of hierarchical classification. The LHT framework consists of a transition network and a confusion loss. The transition network focuses on explicitly learning the label hierarchy transition matrices, which has the potential to effectively encode the underlying correlations embedded within class hierarchies. The confusion loss encourages the classification network to learn correlations across different label hierarchies during training. The proposed framework can be readily adapted to any existing deep network with only minor modifications. We experiment with a series of public benchmark datasets for hierarchical classification problems, and the results demonstrate the superiority of our approach beyond current state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we extend our proposed LHT framework to the skin lesion diagnosis task and validate its great potential in computer-aided diagnosis. The code of our method is available at \href{https://github.com/renzhenwang/label-hierarchy-transition}{https://github.com/renzhenwang/label-hierarchy-transition}.