No Arabic abstract
This is a technical report for CVPR 2021 AliProducts Challenge. AliProducts Challenge is a competition proposed for studying the large-scale and fine-grained commodity image recognition problem encountered by worldleading ecommerce companies. The large-scale product recognition simultaneously meets the challenge of noisy annotations, imbalanced (long-tailed) data distribution and fine-grained classification. In our solution, we adopt stateof-the-art model architectures of both CNNs and Transformer, including ResNeSt, EfficientNetV2, and DeiT. We found that iterative data cleaning, classifier weight normalization, high-resolution finetuning, and test time augmentation are key components to improve the performance of training with the noisy and imbalanced dataset. Finally, we obtain 6.4365% mean class error rate in the leaderboard with our ensemble model.
Class imbalance and noisy labels are the norm rather than the exception in many large-scale classification datasets. Nevertheless, most works in machine learning typically assume balanced and clean data. There have been some recent attempts to tackle, on one side, the problem of learning from noisy labels and, on the other side, learning from long-tailed data. Each group of methods make simplifying assumptions about the other. Due to this separation, the proposed solutions often underperform when both assumptions are violated. In this work, we present a simple two-stage approach based on recent advances in self-supervised learning to treat both challenges simultaneously. It consists of, first, task-agnostic self-supervised pre-training, followed by task-specific fine-tuning using an appropriate loss. Most significantly, we find that self-supervised learning approaches are effectively able to cope with severe class imbalance. In addition, the resulting learned representations are also remarkably robust to label noise, when fine-tuned with an imbalance- and noise-resistant loss function. We validate our claims with experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 augmented with synthetic imbalance and noise, as well as the large-scale inherently noisy Clothing-1M dataset.
Label distributions in real-world are oftentimes long-tailed and imbalanced, resulting in biased models towards dominant labels. While long-tailed recognition has been extensively studied for image classification tasks, limited effort has been made for video domain. In this paper, we introduce VideoLT, a large-scale long-tailed video recognition dataset, as a step toward real-world video recognition. Our VideoLT contains 256,218 untrimmed videos, annotated into 1,004 classes with a long-tailed distribution. Through extensive studies, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art methods used for long-tailed image recognition do not perform well in the video domain due to the additional temporal dimension in video data. This motivates us to propose FrameStack, a simple yet effective method for long-tailed video recognition task. In particular, FrameStack performs sampling at the frame-level in order to balance class distributions, and the sampling ratio is dynamically determined using knowledge derived from the network during training. Experimental results demonstrate that FrameStack can improve classification performance without sacrificing overall accuracy. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/17Skye17/VideoLT.
The long-tail distribution of the visual world poses great challenges for deep learning based classification models on how to handle the class imbalance problem. Existing solutions usually involve class-balancing strategies, e.g., by loss re-weighting, data re-sampling, or transfer learning from head- to tail-classes, but most of them adhere to the scheme of jointly learning representations and classifiers. In this work, we decouple the learning procedure into representation learning and classification, and systematically explore how different balancing strategies affect them for long-tailed recognition. The findings are surprising: (1) data imbalance might not be an issue in learning high-quality representations; (2) with representations learned with the simplest instance-balanced (natural) sampling, it is also possible to achieve strong long-tailed recognition ability by adjusting only the classifier. We conduct extensive experiments and set new state-of-the-art performance on common long-tailed benchmarks like ImageNet-LT, Places-LT and iNaturalist, showing that it is possible to outperform carefully designed losses, sampling strategies, even complex modules with memory, by using a straightforward approach that decouples representation and classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/classifier-balancing.
Real-world imagery is often characterized by a significant imbalance of the number of images per class, leading to long-tailed distributions. An effective and simple approach to long-tailed visual recognition is to learn feature representations and a classifier separately, with instance and class-balanced sampling, respectively. In this work, we introduce a new framework, by making the key observation that a feature representation learned with instance sampling is far from optimal in a long-tailed setting. Our main contribution is a new training method, referred to as Class-Balanced Distillation (CBD), that leverages knowledge distillation to enhance feature representations. CBD allows the feature representation to evolve in the second training stage, guided by the teacher learned in the first stage. The second stage uses class-balanced sampling, in order to focus on under-represented classes. This framework can naturally accommodate the usage of multiple teachers, unlocking the information from an ensemble of models to enhance recognition capabilities. Our experiments show that the proposed technique consistently outperforms the state of the art on long-tailed recognition benchmarks such as ImageNet-LT, iNaturalist17 and iNaturalist18. The experiments also show that our method does not sacrifice the accuracy of head classes to improve the performance of tail classes, unlike most existing work.
Long-tail recognition tackles the natural non-uniformly distributed data in real-world scenarios. While modern classifiers perform well on populated classes, its performance degrades significantly on tail classes. Humans, however, are less affected by this since, when confronted with uncertain examples, they simply opt to provide coarser predictions. Motivated by this, a deep realistic taxonomic classifier (Deep-RTC) is proposed as a new solution to the long-tail problem, combining realism with hierarchical predictions. The model has the option to reject classifying samples at different levels of the taxonomy, once it cannot guarantee the desired performance. Deep-RTC is implemented with a stochastic tree sampling during training to simulate all possible classification conditions at finer or coarser levels and a rejection mechanism at inference time. Experiments on the long-tailed version of four datasets, CIFAR100, AWA2, Imagenet, and iNaturalist, demonstrate that the proposed approach preserves more information on all classes with different popularity levels. Deep-RTC also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in longtailed recognition, hierarchical classification, and learning with rejection literature using the proposed correctly predicted bits (CPB) metric.