All-around Neural Collapse for Imbalanced Classification
This addresses the issue of minority collapse in imbalanced classification for machine learning practitioners, offering a comprehensive solution rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of Neural Collapse (NC) being disrupted in imbalanced classification, where minority class means and classifier vectors get compressed, and proposes an All-around Neural Collapse (AllNC) framework to restore NC across activations, class means, and classifier vectors, achieving state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets.
Neural Collapse (NC) presents an elegant geometric structure that enables individual activations (features), class means and classifier (weights) vectors to reach \textit{optimal} inter-class separability during the terminal phase of training on a \textit{balanced} dataset. Once shifted to imbalanced classification, such an optimal structure of NC can be readily destroyed by the notorious \textit{minority collapse}, where the classifier vectors corresponding to the minority classes are squeezed. In response, existing works endeavor to recover NC typically by optimizing classifiers. However, we discover that this squeezing phenomenon is not only confined to classifier vectors but also occurs with class means. Consequently, reconstructing NC solely at the classifier aspect may be futile, as the feature means remain compressed, leading to the violation of inherent \textit{self-duality} in NC (\textit{i.e.}, class means and classifier vectors converge mutually) and incidentally, resulting in an unsatisfactory collapse of individual activations towards the corresponding class means. To shake off these dilemmas, we present a unified \textbf{All}-around \textbf{N}eural \textbf{C}ollapse framework (AllNC), aiming to comprehensively restore NC across multiple aspects including individual activations, class means and classifier vectors. We thoroughly analyze its effectiveness and verify on multiple benchmark datasets that it achieves state-of-the-art in both balanced and imbalanced settings.