针对长尾回归中不确定性建模不足的问题,提出解耦不确定性优化框架
Beyond Homoscedasticity: Decoupled Uncertainty Optimization for Deep Imbalanced Regression

- 将回归目标建模为条件高斯分布,显式刻画样本级不确定性
- 在多个长尾数据集上实现最优的少样本bMAE和GM指标
- 适合需要精准预测稀有样本的生物、视觉等连续预测任务
深度长尾回归(DIR)广泛存在于年龄估计、深度预测、蛋白质突变活性预测等连续预测任务中,其中标签稀缺的尾部样本往往具有更高的实际价值。然而,现有方法大多在均方误差或其简单变体下学习确定性点映射,隐含假设所有样本具有相同的不确定性水平,忽略了长尾数据中普遍存在的实例级异方差性。我们进一步指出,即使使用异方差负对数似然,也会因梯度耦合问题,在DIR场景下削弱困难尾部样本的学习信号,导致优化停滞和尾部欠拟合。为此,我们提出DUO——一种不确定性感知的长尾回归框架。具体而言,该方法将回归目标建模为条件高斯分布,显式表征实例级预测不确定性,并通过解耦均值-方差优化,将不确定性转化为对尾部样本的动态增强信号。此外,设计了分布引导的对比学习机制,基于样本分布重叠自适应构建正负样本对,缓解特征松散和跨标签语义混淆。在视觉与生物领域的多个DIR基准测试中,DUO在IMDB-WIKI-DIR、AgeDB-DIR和AAV2-DIR上均实现了最优的少样本bMAE和GM表现,同时在少样本MAE上保持竞争力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deep Imbalanced Regression (DIR) is pervasive in continuous prediction tasks across diverse modalities, such as age estimation, depth prediction, and protein mutation activity prediction, where label-scarce tail samples often carry higher practical value. However, most existing methods still learn deterministic point mappings under mean squared error or its simple variants, implicitly assuming a uniform uncertainty level across all samples and thereby overlooking the instance-wise heteroscedasticity that is widespread in long-tailed data. We further point out that even heteroscedastic negative log-likelihood suffers from a gradient coupling issue, which, under DIR scenarios, weakens the learning signal of hard tail samples and leads to optimization inertia as well as tail underfitting. To address this, we propose DUO, an uncertainty-aware long-tailed regression framework. Specifically, the proposed method models the regression target as a conditional Gaussian distribution to explicitly characterize instance-level predictive uncertainty, and transforms uncertainty into a dynamic enhancement signal for tail samples through decoupled mean-variance optimization. Furthermore, we design a distribution-guided contrastive learning mechanism that adaptively constructs positive and negative pairs based on the overlap between sample distributions, thereby alleviating feature looseness and cross-label semantic entanglement. Across visual and biological DIR benchmarks, DUO achieves the best few-shot bMAE and GM on IMDB-WIKI-DIR, AgeDB-DIR, and AAV2-DIR while remaining competitive on few-shot MAE.
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