Learnable Hierarchical Label Embedding and Grouping for Visual Intention Understanding

Qinghongya Shi, Mang Ye, Ziyi Zhang, Bo Du

Abstract: Visual intention understanding is to mine the potential and subjective intention behind the images, which includes the user's hidden emotions and perspectives. Due to the label ambiguity, this paper presents a novel learnable Hierarchical Label Embedding and Grouping (HLEG). It is featured in three aspects: 1) For effectively mining the underlying meaning of images, we build a hierarchical transformer structure to model the hierarchy of labels, formulating a multi-level classification scheme. 2) For the label ambiguity issue, we design a novel learnable label embedding with accumulative grouping integrated into the hierarchical structure, which does not require additional annotation. 3) For multi-level classification, we propose a “Hard-First” optimization strategy to adaptively adjust the classification optimization at different levels, avoiding over-classification of the coarse labels. HLEG enhances the F1 score (average +1.24%) and mAP (average +1.48%) on Intentonomy over prominent baseline models. Comprehensive experiments validate the superiority of our proposed method, achieving state-of-the-art performance under various settings. Code is available at https://github.com/ShiQingHongYa/HLEG .