arXiv:2506.23280cs.LG2025-06

提出显式贝叶斯分类器BAPE,解决长尾数据下的分类偏差问题。

BAPE: Learning an Explicit Bayes Classifier for Long-tailed Visual Recognition

  • 显式建模后验概率参数,直接学习贝叶斯最优分类器
  • 在CIFAR-10-LT等数据集上显著提升长尾分类准确率
  • 无需额外计算开销,可与现有方法互补使用

贝叶斯决策理论主张贝叶斯分类器是降低机器学习风险的最优方法。当前深度学习方法通常通过隐式估计后验概率(如最小化Softmax交叉熵损失)来求解最优分类器,该方法在平衡数据集上表现良好,但在现实世界中长尾分布下会引发梯度失衡,无法保证贝叶斯最优决策规则。为此,本文提出新方法BAPE,通过显式建模后验概率参数并基于点估计求解,直接学习贝叶斯分类器,无需依赖梯度下降。同时提出简单有效的分布调整技术,使模型在任意不平衡测试分布下仍能保持高性能,且不增加计算成本。实验证明,该方法在CIFAR-10-LT、CIFAR-100-LT、ImageNet-LT和iNaturalist上显著提升主流网络的泛化能力,且与现有长尾学习方法正交。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Bayesian decision theory advocates the Bayes classifier as the optimal approach for minimizing the risk in machine learning problems. Current deep learning algorithms usually solve for the optimal classifier by \emph{implicitly} estimating the posterior probabilities, \emph{e.g.}, by minimizing the Softmax cross-entropy loss. This simple methodology has been proven effective for meticulously balanced academic benchmark datasets. However, it is not applicable to the long-tailed data distributions in the real world, where it leads to the gradient imbalance issue and fails to ensure the Bayes optimal decision rule. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel approach (BAPE) that provides a more precise theoretical estimation of the data distributions by \emph{explicitly} modeling the parameters of the posterior probabilities and solving them with point estimation. Consequently, our method directly learns the Bayes classifier without gradient descent based on Bayes' theorem, simultaneously alleviating the gradient imbalance and ensuring the Bayes optimal decision rule. Furthermore, we propose a straightforward yet effective \emph{distribution adjustment} technique. This method enables the Bayes classifier trained from the long-tailed training set to effectively adapt to the test data distribution with an arbitrary imbalance factor, thereby enhancing performance without incurring additional computational costs. In addition, we demonstrate the gains of our method are orthogonal to existing learning approaches for long-tailed scenarios, as they are mostly designed under the principle of \emph{implicitly} estimating the posterior probabilities. Extensive empirical evaluations on CIFAR-10-LT, CIFAR-100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist demonstrate that our method significantly improves the generalization performance of popular deep networks, despite its simplicity.

长尾识别贝叶斯方法分类器优化

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