Multi-label Classification Using Self-Supervised Learning: Addressing Class Inter-Dependency and Data Imbalance

Developing multi-label classification models under significant class imbalance, and when annotating data requires expert-level knowledge remains a major challenge. Additionally, interdependency and correlation among labels are common in multi-label problems. In this work, we introduce a novel framework to address these challenges. Our approach extracts robust discriminative features from unlabeled data through self-supervised contrastive learning and uses an adaptive data augmentation mechanism (ACBA) to balance the dataset. Independent binary classifiers are trained for each class, using a new custom Focal Weighted Cross-Entropy (FWCE) loss function to focus on hard-to-classify examples. A correlation learning module then refines predictions by integrating statistical and domain-specific knowledge. Finally, a meta-learner, employing a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and multi-head attention, identifies complex relationships between classes, even for those that rarely occur together. We used the detection of thoracic diseases using chest X-rays, a domain with a major class imbalance and highly associated labels, to validate our approach. Our findings demonstrate the potential of our method to apply to other medical and non-medical imaging scenarios with similar multi-label classification problems.