Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss

Deep learning algorithms can fare poorly when the training dataset suffers from heavy class-imbalance but the testing criterion requires good generalization on less frequent classes. We design two novel methods to improve performance in such scenarios. First, we propose a theoretically-principled label-distribution-aware margin (LDAM) loss motivated by minimizing a margin-based generalization bound. This loss replaces the standard cross-entropy objective during training and can be applied with prior strategies for training with class-imbalance such as re-weighting or re-sampling. Second, we propose a simple, yet effective, training schedule that defers re-weighting until after the initial stage, allowing the model to learn an initial representation while avoiding some of the complications associated with re-weighting or re-sampling. We test our methods on several benchmark vision tasks including the real-world imbalanced dataset iNaturalist 2018. Our experiments show that either of these methods alone can already improve over existing techniques and their combination achieves even better performance gains.

PDF Abstract NeurIPS 2019 PDF NeurIPS 2019 Abstract
Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Long-tail learning with class descriptors AWA-LT LDAM Per-Class Accuracy 69.1 # 5
Long-Tailed Accuracy 93.5 # 2
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-100-LT (ρ=10) LDAM-DRW Error Rate 41.29 # 30
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-100-LT (ρ=100) LDAM-DRW Error Rate 57.96 # 59
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-10-LT (ρ=10) Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM, CE) Error Rate 13.61 # 49
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-10-LT (ρ=10) LDAM-DRW Error Rate 11.84 # 38
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-10-LT (ρ=10) Class-balanced Resampling Error Rate 13.21 # 47
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-10-LT (ρ=100) LDAM-DRW Error Rate 22.97 # 25
Long-tail Learning COCO-MLT LDAM(ResNet-50) Average mAP 40.53 # 13
Long-tail learning with class descriptors CUB-LT LDAM Per-Class Accuracy 50.1 # 4
Long-Tailed Accuracy 64.1 # 4
Long-tail learning with class descriptors SUN-LT LDAM Per-Class Accuracy 29.8 # 5
Long-Tailed Accuracy 36.4 # 4
Long-tail Learning VOC-MLT LDAM(ResNet-50) Average mAP 70.73 # 12

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