With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of longtailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula (1−β n )/(1−β), where n is the number of samples and β ∈ [0, 1) is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets. * The work was performed while Yin Cui and Yang Song worked at Google (a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.).
Class-Balanced Loss sets these weights in proportion to the inverse of the number of samples per class REF .
Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples
2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Computer Science