Adaptive Hierarchical Representation Learning for Long-Tailed Object Detection

General object detectors are always evaluated on hand-designed datasets, e.g., MS COCO and Pascal VOC, which tend to maintain balanced data distribution over different classes. However, it goes against the practical applications in the real world which suffer from a heavy class imbalance problem, known as the long-tailed object detection. In this paper, we propose a novel method, named Adaptive Hierarchical Representation Learning (AHRL), from a metric learning perspective to address long-tailed object detection. We visualize each learned class representation in the feature space, and observe that some classes, especially under-represented scarce classes, are prone to cluster with analogous ones due to the lack of discriminative representation. Inspired by this, we propose to split the whole feature space into a hierarchical structure and eliminate the problem in a divide-and-conquer way. AHRL contains a two-stage training paradigm. First, we train a normal baseline model and construct the hierarchical structure under the unsupervised clustering method. Then, we design an AHR loss that consists of two optimization objectives. On the one hand, AHR loss retains the hierarchical structure and keeps representation clusters away from each other. On the other hand, AHR loss adopts adaptive margins according to specific class pairs in the same cluster to further optimize locally. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging LVIS dataset and AHRL outperforms all the existing state-of-the-art(SOTA) methods, with 29.1% segmentation AP and 29.3% box AP on LVIS v0.5 and 27.6% segmentation AP and 28.7% box AP on LVIS v1.0 based on ResNet-101. We hope our simple yet effective approach will serve as a solid baseline to help stimulate future research in long-tailed object detection. Code will be released soon.