Long-Tailed Recognition Using Class-Balanced Experts

Classic deep learning methods achieve impressive results in image recognition over large-scale artificially-balanced datasets. However, real-world datasets exhibit highly class-imbalanced distributions. In this work we address the problem of long tail recognition wherein the training set is highly imbalanced and the test set is kept balanced. The key challenges faced by any long tail recognition technique are relative imbalance amongst the classes and data scarcity or unseen concepts for mediumshot or fewshot classes. Existing techniques rely on data-resampling, cost sensitive learning, online hard example mining, reshaping the loss objective and complex memory based models to address this problem. We instead propose an ensemble of experts technique that decomposes the imbalanced problem into multiple balanced classification problems which are more tractable. Our ensemble of experts reaches close to state-of-the-art results and an extended ensemble establishes new state-of-the-art on two benchmarks for long tail recognition. We conduct numerous experiments to analyse the performance of the ensemble, and show that in modern datasets relative imbalance is a harder problem than data scarcity.