Adaptive Gradient Calibration for Single-Positive Multi-Label Learning in Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification

Abstract: Multi-label classification (MLC) offers a more comprehensive semantic understanding of Remote Sensing (RS) imagery compared to traditional single-label classification (SLC). However, obtaining complete annotations for MLC is particularly challenging due to the complexity and high cost of the labeling process. As a practical alternative, single-positive multi-label learning (SPML) has emerged, where each image is annotated with only one relevant label, and the model is expected to recover the full set of labels. While scalable, SPML introduces significant supervision ambiguity, demanding specialized solutions for model training. Although various SPML methods have been proposed in the computer vision domain, research in the RS context remains limited. To bridge this gap, we propose Adaptive Gradient Calibration (AdaGC), a novel and generalizable SPML framework tailored to RS imagery. AdaGC adopts a gradient calibration (GC) mechanism combined with Mixup and a dual exponential moving average (EMA) module for robust pseudo-label generation. To maximize AdaGC's effectiveness, we introduce a simple yet theoretically grounded indicator to adaptively trigger GC after an initial warm-up stage based on training dynamics, thereby guaranteeing the effectiveness of GC in mitigating overfitting to label noise. Extensive experiments on two benchmark RS datasets under two distinct label noise types demonstrate that AdaGC achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance while maintaining strong robustness across diverse settings.