Long-Tailed Classification Based on Coarse-Grained Leading Forest and Multi-Center Loss

Long-tailed(LT) classification is an unavoidable and challenging problem in the real world. Most of the existing long-tailed classification methods focus only on solving the inter-class imbalance in which there are more samples in the head class than in the tail class, while ignoring the intra-lass imbalance in which the number of samples of the head attribute within the same class is much larger than the number of samples of the tail attribute. The deviation in the model is caused by both of these factors, and due to the fact that attributes are implicit in most datasets and the combination of attributes is very complex, the intra-class imbalance is more difficult to handle. For this purpose, we proposed a long-tailed classification framework, known as \textbf{\textsc{Cognisance}}, which is founded on Coarse-Grained Leading Forest (CLF) and Multi-Center Loss (MCL), aiming to build a multi-granularity joint solution model by means of invariant feature learning. In this method, we designed an unsupervised learning method, i.e., CLF, to better characterize the distribution of attributes within a class. Depending on the distribution of attributes, we can flexibly construct sampling strategies suitable for different environments. In addition, we introduce a new metric learning loss (MCL), which aims to gradually eliminate confusing attributes during the feature learning process. More importantly, this approach does not depend on a specific model structure and can be integrated with existing LT methods as an independent component. We have conducted extensive experiments and our approach has state-of-the-art performance in both existing benchmarks ImageNet-GLT and MSCOCO-GLT, and can improve the performance of existing LT methods. Our codes are available on GitHub: \url{https://github.com/jinyery/cognisance}