Long-Tailed Multi-Label Visual Recognition by Collaborative Training on Uniform and Re-Balanced Samplings

Long-tailed data distribution is common in many multilabel visual recognition tasks and the direct use of these data for training usually leads to relatively low performance on tail classes. While re-balanced data sampling can improve the performance on tail classes, it may also hurt the performance on head classes in training due to label co-occurrence. In this paper, we propose a new approach to train on both uniform and re-balanced samplings in a collaborative way, resulting in performance improvement on both head and tail classes. More specifically, we design a visual recognition network with two branches: one takes the uniform sampling as input while the other takes the rebalanced sampling as the input. For each branch, we conduct visual recognition using a binary-cross-entropy-based classification loss with learnable logit compensation. We further define a new cross-branch loss to enforce the consistency when the same input image goes through the two branches. We conduct extensive experiments on VOC-LT and COCO-LT datasets. The results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on long-tailed multi-label visual recognition.