A Mask-based Output Layer for Multi-level Hierarchical Classification

This paper proposes a novel mask-based output layer for multi-level hierarchical classification, addressing the limitations of existing methods which (i) often do not embed the taxonomy structure being used, (ii) use a complex backbone neural network with.. disjoint output layers that do not constraint each other, (iii) may output predictions that are often inconsistent with the taxonomy in place, and (iv) have often a fixed value of... Specifically, we propose a model agnostic output layer that embeds the taxonomy and that can be combined with any model. Our proposed output layer implements a top-down divide-and-conquer strategy through a masking mechanism to enforce that predictions comply with the embedded hierarchy structure. Focusing on image classification, we evaluate the performance of our proposed output layer on three different datasets, each with a three-level hierarchical structure. Experiments on these datasets show that our proposed mask-based output layer allows to improve several multi-level hierarchical classification models using various performance metrics.