Long-tailed Recognition by Routing Diverse Distribution-Aware Experts

Xudong Wang, Long Lian, Zhongqi Miao, Ziwei Liu, Stella Yu

Keywords: Long-tailed Recognition, Bias-variance Decomposition

Abstract:

Natural data are often long-tail distributed over semantic classes. Existing recognition methods tackle this imbalanced classification by placing more emphasis on the tail data, through class re-balancing/re-weighting or ensembling over different data groups, resulting in increased tail accuracies but reduced head accuracies.
We take a dynamic view of the training data and provide a principled model bias and variance analysis as the training data fluctuates: Existing long-tail classifiers invariably increase the model variance and the head-tail model bias gap remains large, due to more and larger confusion with hard negatives for the tail.
We propose a new long-tailed classifier called RoutIng Diverse Experts (RIDE). It reduces the model variance with multiple experts, reduces the model bias with a distribution-aware diversity loss, reduces the computational cost with a dynamic expert routing module. RIDE outperforms the state-of-the-art by 5% to 7% on CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT and iNaturalist 2018 benchmarks. It is also a universal framework that is applicable to various backbone networks, long-tailed algorithms and training mechanisms for consistent performance gains. Our code is available at: https://github.com/frank-xwang/RIDE-LongTailRecognition.

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Code: [ frank-xwang/RIDE-LongTailRecognition](https://github.com/frank-xwang/RIDE-LongTailRecognition) + [ 1 community implementation](https://paperswithcode.com/paper/?openreview=D9I3drBz4UC)

Data: [CIFAR-100](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar-100), [CIFAR100-LT](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar100-lt), [ImageNet](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/imagenet), [ImageNet-LT](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/imagenet-lt), [iNaturalist](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/inaturalist)

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2010.01809/code)