BCE3S: Binary Cross-Entropy Based Tripartite Synergistic Learning for Long-tailed Recognition

For long-tailed recognition (LTR) tasks, high intra-class compactness and inter-class separability in both head and tail classes, as well as balanced separability among all the classifier vectors, are preferred. The existing LTR methods based on cross-entropy (CE) loss not only struggle to learn features with desirable properties but also couple imbalanced classifier vectors in the denominator of its Softmax, amplifying the imbalance effects in LTR. In this paper, for the LTR, we propose a binary cross-entropy (BCE)-based tripartite synergistic learning, termed BCE3S, which consists of three components: (1) BCE-based joint learning optimizes both the classifier and sample features, which achieves better compactness and separability among features than the CE-based joint learning, by decoupling the metrics between feature and the imbalanced classifier vectors in multiple Sigmoid; (2) BCE-based contrastive learning further improves the intra-class compactness of features; (3) BCE-based uniform learning balances the separability among classifier vectors and interactively enhances the feature properties by combining with the joint learning. The extensive experiments show that the LTR model trained by BCE3S not only achieves higher compactness and separability among sample features, but also balances the classifier's separability, achieving SOTA performance on various long-tailed datasets such as CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist2018.

EPL: Empirical Prototype Learning for Deep Face Recognition

Prototype learning is widely used in face recognition, which takes the row vectors of coefficient matrix in the last linear layer of the feature extraction model as the prototypes for each class. When the prototypes are updated using the facial sample feature gradients in the model training, they are prone to being pulled away from the class center by the hard samples, resulting in decreased overall model performance. In this paper, we explicitly define prototypes as the expectations of sample features in each class and design the empirical prototypes using the existing samples in the dataset. We then devise a strategy to adaptively update these empirical prototypes during the model training based on the similarity between the sample features and the empirical prototypes. Furthermore, we propose an empirical prototype learning (EPL) method, which utilizes an adaptive margin parameter with respect to sample features. EPL assigns larger margins to the normal samples and smaller margins to the hard samples, allowing the learned empirical prototypes to better reflect the class center dominated by the normal samples and finally pull the hard samples towards the empirical prototypes through the learning. The extensive experiments on MFR, IJB-C, LFW, CFP-FP, AgeDB, and MegaFace demonstrate the effectiveness of EPL. Our code is available at $\href{https://github.com/WakingHours-GitHub/EPL}{https://github.com/WakingHours-GitHub/EPL}$.