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Main Authors: Park, Seulki, Wang, Zilin, Yu, Stella X.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14737
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author Park, Seulki
Wang, Zilin
Yu, Stella X.
author_facet Park, Seulki
Wang, Zilin
Yu, Stella X.
contents Hierarchical image recognition seeks to predict class labels along a semantic taxonomy, from broad categories to specific ones, typically under the tidy assumption that every training image is fully annotated along its taxonomy path. Reality is messier: A distant bird may be labeled only bird, while a clear close-up may justify bald eagle. We introduce free-grain training, where labels may appear at any level of the taxonomy and models must learn consistent hierarchical predictions from incomplete, mixed-granularity supervision. We build benchmark datasets with varying label granularity and show that existing hierarchical methods deteriorate sharply in this setting. To make up for missing supervision, we propose two simple solutions: One adds broad text-based supervision that captures visual attributes, and the other treats missing labels at specific taxonomy levels as a semi-supervised learning problem. We also study free-grained inference, where the model chooses how deep to predict, returning a reliable coarse label when a fine-grained one is uncertain. Together, our task, datasets, and methods move hierarchical recognition closer to the way labels arise in the real world.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_14737
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Free-Grained Hierarchical Visual Recognition
Park, Seulki
Wang, Zilin
Yu, Stella X.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Hierarchical image recognition seeks to predict class labels along a semantic taxonomy, from broad categories to specific ones, typically under the tidy assumption that every training image is fully annotated along its taxonomy path. Reality is messier: A distant bird may be labeled only bird, while a clear close-up may justify bald eagle. We introduce free-grain training, where labels may appear at any level of the taxonomy and models must learn consistent hierarchical predictions from incomplete, mixed-granularity supervision. We build benchmark datasets with varying label granularity and show that existing hierarchical methods deteriorate sharply in this setting. To make up for missing supervision, we propose two simple solutions: One adds broad text-based supervision that captures visual attributes, and the other treats missing labels at specific taxonomy levels as a semi-supervised learning problem. We also study free-grained inference, where the model chooses how deep to predict, returning a reliable coarse label when a fine-grained one is uncertain. Together, our task, datasets, and methods move hierarchical recognition closer to the way labels arise in the real world.
title Free-Grained Hierarchical Visual Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14737