Multi-label image classification is a fundamental but challenging task
towards general visual understanding. Existing methods found the region-level
cues (e.g., features from RoIs) can facilitate multi-label classification.
Nevertheless, such methods usually require laborious object-level annotations
(i.e., object labels and bounding boxes) for effective learning of the
object-level visual features. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient
deep framework to boost multi-label classification by distilling knowledge from
weakly-supervised detection task without bounding box annotations.
Specifically, given the image-level annotations, (1) we first develop a
weakly-supervised detection (WSD) model, and then (2) construct an end-to-end
multi-label image classification framework augmented by a knowledge
distillation module that guides the classification model by the WSD model
according to the class-level predictions for the whole image and the
object-level visual features for object RoIs. The WSD model is the teacher
model and the classification model is the student model. After this cross-task
knowledge distillation, the performance of the classification model is
significantly improved and the efficiency is maintained since the WSD model can
be safely discarded in the test phase. Extensive experiments on two large-scale
datasets (MS-COCO and NUS-WIDE) show that our framework achieves superior
performances over the state-of-the-art methods on both performance and
efficiency.

本文提出了一种基于深度学习并利用弱监督检测模型去除物体标注信息的多标签图像分类方法，该方法能有效提高性能并保持高效。实验证明该方法在两个大型数据集（MS-COCO 和 NUS-WIDE）上均优于现有的先进方法。