A Survey of Deep Long-Tail Classification Advancements
This is an incremental survey that synthesizes existing research for practitioners and researchers in machine learning dealing with real-world imbalanced data.
The paper surveys recent advancements in deep long-tail classification, addressing the challenge of learning from imbalanced data where SOTA accuracies on benchmarks like CIFAR100 are below 75%, and provides a taxonomy and quantitative comparison of methods.
Many data distributions in the real world are hardly uniform. Instead, skewed and long-tailed distributions of various kinds are commonly observed. This poses an interesting problem for machine learning, where most algorithms assume or work well with uniformly distributed data. The problem is further exacerbated by current state-of-the-art deep learning models requiring large volumes of training data. As such, learning from imbalanced data remains a challenging research problem and a problem that must be solved as we move towards more real-world applications of deep learning. In the context of class imbalance, state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracies on standard benchmark datasets for classification typically fall less than 75%, even for less challenging datasets such as CIFAR100. Nonetheless, there has been progress in this niche area of deep learning. To this end, in this survey, we provide a taxonomy of various methods proposed for addressing the problem of long-tail classification, focusing on works that happened in the last few years under a single mathematical framework. We also discuss standard performance metrics, convergence studies, feature distribution and classifier analysis. We also provide a quantitative comparison of the performance of different SOTA methods and conclude the survey by discussing the remaining challenges and future research direction.