No Arabic abstract
The problem of long-tailed recognition, where the number of examples per class is highly unbalanced, is considered. It is hypothesized that the well known tendency of standard classifier training to overfit to popular classes can be exploited for effective transfer learning. Rather than eliminating this overfitting, e.g. by adopting popular class-balanced sampling methods, the learning algorithm should instead leverage this overfitting to transfer geometric information from popular to low-shot classes. A new classifier architecture, GistNet, is proposed to support this goal, using constellations of classifier parameters to encode the class geometry. A new learning algorithm is then proposed for GeometrIc Structure Transfer (GIST), with resort to a combination of loss functions that combine class-balanced and random sampling to guarantee that, while overfitting to the popular classes is restricted to geometric parameters, it is leveraged to transfer class geometry from popular to few-shot classes. This enables better generalization for few-shot classes without the need for the manual specification of class weights, or even the explicit grouping of classes into different types. Experiments on two popular long-tailed recognition datasets show that GistNet outperforms existing solutions to this problem.
Our work focuses on tackling the challenging but natural visual recognition task of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes occupy most of the data, while most classes have rarely few samples). In the literature, class re-balancing strategies (e.g., re-weighting and re-sampling) are the prominent and effective methods proposed to alleviate the extreme imbalance for dealing with long-tailed problems. In this paper, we firstly discover that these re-balancing methods achieving satisfactory recognition accuracy owe to that they could significantly promote the classifier learning of deep networks. However, at the same time, they will unexpectedly damage the representative ability of the learned deep features to some extent. Therefore, we propose a unified Bilateral-Branch Network (BBN) to take care of both representation learning and classifier learning simultaneously, where each branch does perform its own duty separately. In particular, our BBN model is further equipped with a novel cumulative learning strategy, which is designed to first learn the universal patterns and then pay attention to the tail data gradually. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including the large-scale iNaturalist ones, justify that the proposed BBN can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, validation experiments can demonstrate both our preliminary discovery and effectiveness of tailored designs in BBN for long-tailed problems. Our method won the first place in the iNaturalist 2019 large scale species classification competition, and our code is open-source and available at https://github.com/Megvii-Nanjing/BBN.
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.
The problem of long-tailed recognition, where the number of examples per class is highly unbalanced, is considered. While training with class-balanced sampling has been shown effective for this problem, it is known to over-fit to few-shot classes. It is hypothesized that this is due to the repeated sampling of examples and can be addressed by feature space augmentation. A new feature augmentation strategy, EMANATE, based on back-tracking of features across epochs during training, is proposed. It is shown that, unlike class-balanced sampling, this is an adversarial augmentation strategy. A new sampling procedure, Breadcrumb, is then introduced to implement adversarial class-balanced sampling without extra computation. Experiments on three popular long-tailed recognition datasets show that Breadcrumb training produces classifiers that outperform existing solutions to the problem.
Real-world visual recognition problems often exhibit long-tailed distributions, where the amount of data for learning in different categories shows significant imbalance. Standard classification models learned on such data distribution often make biased predictions towards the head classes while generalizing poorly to the tail classes. In this paper, we present two effective modifications of CNNs to improve network learning from long-tailed distribution. First, we present a Class Activation Map Calibration (CAMC) module to improve the learning and prediction of network classifiers, by enforcing network prediction based on important image regions. The proposed CAMC module highlights the correlated image regions across data and reinforces the representations in these areas to obtain a better global representation for classification. Furthermore, we investigate the use of normalized classifiers for representation learning in long-tailed problems. Our empirical study demonstrates that by simply scaling the outputs of the classifier with an appropriate scalar, we can effectively improve the classification accuracy on tail classes without losing the accuracy of head classes. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our design and we set new state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks, including ImageNet-LT, Places-LT, iNaturalist 2018, CIFAR10-LT, and CIFAR100-LT.