Papers › ACE: Ally Complementary Experts for Solving Long-Tailed Recognition in One-Shot

ACE: Ally Complementary Experts for Solving Long-Tailed Recognition in One-Shot

5 Aug 2021ICCV 2021 10arXiv:2108.02385archive 2025-07-28

Jiarui Cai, Yizhou Wang, Jenq-Neng Hwang

One-stage long-tailed recognition methods improve the overall performance in a "seesaw" manner, i.e., either sacrifice the head's accuracy for better tail classification or elevate the head's accuracy even higher but ignore the tail. Existing algorithms bypass such trade-off by a multi-stage training process: pre-training on imbalanced set and fine-tuning on balanced set. Though achieving promising performance, not only are they sensitive to the generalizability of the pre-trained model, but also not easily integrated into other computer vision tasks like detection and segmentation, where pre-training of classifiers solely is not applicable. In this paper, we propose a one-stage long-tailed recognition scheme, ally complementary experts (ACE), where the expert is the most knowledgeable specialist in a sub-set that dominates its training, and is complementary to other experts in the less-seen categories without being disturbed by what it has never seen. We design a distribution-adaptive optimizer to adjust the learning pace of each expert to avoid over-fitting. Without special bells and whistles, the vanilla ACE outperforms the current one-stage SOTA method by 3-10% on CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT and iNaturalist datasets. It is also shown to be the first one to break the "seesaw" trade-off by improving the accuracy of the majority and minority categories simultaneously in only one stage. Code and trained models are at https://github.com/jrcai/ACE.

PaperPDFConference PDF

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Long-tail Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-10-LT (ρ=100) ACE (4 experts) Error Rate 18.6 #19 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-100-LT (ρ=100) ACE (4 experts) Error Rate 50.4 #31 of 66 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections