{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/harnessing-superclasses-for-learning-from","title":"Harnessing Superclasses for Learning from Hierarchical Databases","arxiv_id":"2411.16438","date":"2024-11-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nicolas Urbani","Sylvain Rousseau","Yves GRANDVALET","Leonardo Tanzi"],"abstract":"In many large-scale classification problems, classes are organized in a known hierarchy, typically represented as a tree expressing the inclusion of classes in superclasses. We introduce a loss for this type of supervised hierarchical classification. It utilizes the knowledge of the hierarchy to assign each example not only to a class but also to all encompassing superclasses. Applicable to any feedforward architecture with a softmax output layer, this loss is a proper scoring rule, in that its expectation is minimized by the true posterior class probabilities. This property allows us to simultaneously pursue consistent classification objectives between superclasses and fine-grained classes, and eliminates the need for a performance trade-off between different granularities. We conduct an experimental study on three reference benchmarks, in which we vary the size of the training sets to cover a diverse set of learning scenarios. Our approach does not entail any significant additional computational cost compared with the loss of cross-entropy. It improves accuracy and reduces the number of coarse errors, with predicted labels that are distant from ground-truth labels in the tree.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.16438v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16438v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"harnessing-superclasses-for-learning-from","repo_url":"https://github.com/heudiasyc/Harnessing-Superclasses-for-Learning-from-Hierarchical-Databases","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"scoring-rule","task_name":"scoring rule"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}