Abstract: A method for training a multi-class classification model includes receiving training data corresponding to a plurality of classes. For each class in the plurality of classes, the method includes training a binary classification model configured to determine whether or not an observation of training data belongs to the class and for each observation of training data identified as belonging to the class, extracting one or more class identification features from the observation of training data based on activations of an intermediate attention layer in the binary classification model. A multi-class classification model is trained using the class identification features extracted for each of the plurality of classes.