Test-Agnostic Long-Tailed Recognition by Test-Time Aggregating Diverse Experts with Self-Supervision

Existing long-tailed recognition methods, aiming to train class-balance models from long-tailed data, generally assume the models would be evaluated on the uniform test class distribution. However, the practical test class distribution often violates such an assumption (e.g., being long-tailed or even inversely long-tailed), which would lead existing methods to fail in real-world applications. In this work, we study a more practical task setting, called test-agnostic long-tailed recognition, where the training class distribution is long-tailed while the test class distribution is unknown and can be skewed arbitrarily. In addition to the issue of class imbalance, this task poses another challenge: the class distribution shift between the training and test samples is unidentified. To address this task, we propose a new method, called Test-time Aggregating Diverse Experts (TADE), that presents two solution strategies: (1) a novel skill-diverse expert learning strategy that trains diverse experts to excel at handling different test distributions from a single long-tailed training distribution; (2) a novel test-time expert aggregation strategy that leverages self-supervision to aggregate multiple experts for handling various test distributions. Moreover, we theoretically show that our method has provable ability to simulate unknown test class distributions. Promising results on both vanilla and test-agnostic long-tailed recognition verify the effectiveness of TADE. Code is available at https://github.com/Vanint/TADE-AgnosticLT.