Long-tail learning via logit adjustment
Authors: Aditya Krishna Menon, Sadeep Jayasumana, Ankit Singh Rawat, Himanshu Jain, Andreas Veit, Sanjiv Kumar
Venue: ICLR 2021 Spotlight
Keywords: long-tail learning, class imbalance
Abstract: Real-world classification problems typically exhibit an imbalanced or long-tailed label distribution, wherein many labels have only a few associated samples. This poses a challenge for generalisation on such labels, and also  makes naive learning biased towards dominant labels. In this paper,  we present a statistical framework that unifies and generalises several recent proposals to cope with these challenges. Our framework revisits the classic idea of logit adjustment based on the label frequencies, which encourages a large relative margin between logits of rare positive versus dominant negative labels. This yields two techniques  for long-tail learning, where such adjustment is either applied post-hoc to a trained model, or enforced in the loss during training. These techniques are statistically grounded, and practically effective on four real-world datasets with long-tailed label distributions.