解决长尾分布中类别混淆问题,提升模型区分能力
CUE: Concept-Aware Multi-Label Expansion to Mitigate Concept Confusion in Long-Tailed Learning

- 引入多标签概念信号,缓解单标签监督导致的特征共享抑制
- 在多个长尾数据集上实现平衡性能,超越当前最先进方法
- 适合关注长尾学习与类别间区分度的研究者
真实场景中的识别任务普遍存在长尾分布,即少数头部类别样本众多,多数尾部类别样本稀少。尽管近期基于微调大模型的长尾学习方法表现优异,但现有方法多聚焦于缓解长尾偏差,忽视了长尾分布引发的概念混淆问题。本文指出,这是由于单标签监督在长尾分布下具有互斥性,抑制了相关类别间的特征共享,加剧了头部类别的主导地位,破坏了类别间的可区分性。为此,本文提出CUE(Concept-aware mUlti-label Expansion),通过构建概念集合来恢复被破坏的类别间关系:(i) 利用零样本CLIP提取实例级视觉线索;(ii) 通过LLM生成类别级语义线索;两种线索分别以加权二元逻辑调整(BLA)损失融合,并与基础逻辑调整(LA)损失联合优化。在多个长尾基准测试上,CUE实现了优异且均衡的性能,显著优于现有最优方法。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Long-tailed distributions are common in real-world recognition tasks, where a few head classes have many samples while most tail classes have very few. Recently, fine-tuning foundation models for long-tailed learning has gained attention due to their excellent performance. However, most existing methods focus solely on mitigating long-tailed distribution bias while overlooking concept confusion caused by the long-tailed distribution. In this paper, we study this problem and attribute it to the mutual exclusivity of single-label supervision under long-tailed distributions, which suppresses feature sharing among related classes and amplifies the dominance of head classes, leading to disrupted inter-class discriminability. To address this, we propose CUE, Concept-aware mUlti-label Expansion, which introduces multi-label concept signals to preserve disrupted inter-class relationships. Specifically, CUE constructs concept sets by (i) extracting instance-level visual cues from zero-shot CLIP and (ii) generating class-level semantic cues with LLM; the two cues are incorporated via separately weighted Binary Logit-Adjustment (BLA) auxiliary losses and jointly optimized with the baseline Logit-Adjustment (LA) loss. Experiments on several long-tailed benchmarks, CUE achieves balanced and strong performance, surpassing recent state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhangruichi/CUE.
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