Conflict-Buffering Optimization by Symmetry Teleportation for Deep Long-Tailed Recognition

Deep long-tailed recognition (DLTR) has garnered increasing attention due to the inherent imbalance in many real-world problems (e.g., multimedia processing). Recently, some multi-objective optimization (MOO)-based solutions have been proposed to address conflicts during representation learning in DLTR. However, these methods face two primary challenges: (1) their effectiveness is subject to the power of MOO, which is arguable in recent literature, and (2) MOO approaches are resource-intensive due to frequent gradient operations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach: conflict-Buffering OptimizatiOn by Symmetry Teleportation (BOOST), which avoids altering complicated gradient combinations as previous methods did. A major challenge in this approach is the absence of off-the-shelf symmetry teleportation algorithms suitable for modern deep neural networks. To address this, we cast symmetry teleportation as the optimization of low-rank adaptation (LoRA). Specifically, we first divide categories into multiple groups and detect conflicts among them. When a conflict arises, we employ LoRA to identify an alternative point on the same loss level set, reducing conflicts and facilitating balanced optimization. To achieve this, we decouple symmetry teleportation into two objectives-loss invariance and balanced gradient maximization-and design corresponding objectives for LoRA optimization. Besides, we propose a trajectory reuse strategy to continually benefit from advanced optimizers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BOOST achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple mainstream DLTR datasets.