Abstract

The visual world naturally exhibits an imbalance in the number of object or scene instances resulting in a long-tailed distribution. This imbalance poses significant challenges for classification models based on deep learning. Oversampling instances of the tail classes attempts to solve this imbalance. However, the limited visual diver- sity results in a network with poor representation ability. A simple counter to this is decoupling the representation and classifier net- works and using oversampling only to train the classifier. In this paper, instead of repeatedly re-sampling the same im- age (and thereby features), we explore a direction that attempts to generate meaningful features by estimating the tail category’s distribution. Inspired by ideas from recent work on few-shot learn- ing [ 53], we create calibrated distributions to sample additional features that are subsequently used to train the classifier. Through several experiments on the CIFAR-100-LT (long-tail) dataset with varying imbalance factors and on mini-ImageNet-LT (long-tail), we show the efficacy of our approach and establish a new state-of- the-art. We also present a qualitative analysis of generated features using t-SNE visualizations and analyze the nearest neighbors used to calibrate the tail class distributions. Our code is available at https://github.com/rahulvigneswaran/TailCalibX.