Improving tail-class representation with centroid contrastive learning

• Main Authors: Tiong, Anthony Meng Huat, Li, Junnan, Lin, Guosheng, Li, Boyang, Xiong, Caiming, Hoi, Steven C. H.
• Other Authors: School of Computer Science and Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering; Imbalanced Learning; Contrastive Learning
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/172214
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In vision domain, large-scale natural datasets typically exhibit long-tailed distribution which has large class imbalance between head and tail classes. This distribution poses difficulty in learning good representations for tail classes. Recent developments have shown good long-tailed model can be learnt by decoupling the training into representation learning and classifier balancing. However, these works pay insufficient consideration on the long-tailed effect on representation learning. In this work, we propose interpolative centroid contrastive learning (ICCL) to improve long-tailed representation learning. ICCL interpolates two images from a class-agnostic sampler and a class-aware sampler, and trains the model such that the representation of the interpolative image can be used to retrieve the centroids for both source classes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on multiple long-tailed image classification benchmarks.