Papers › Balanced Meta-Softmax for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition
Balanced Meta-Softmax for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition
Jiawei Ren, Cunjun Yu, Shunan Sheng, Xiao Ma, Haiyu Zhao, Shuai Yi, Hongsheng Li
Deep classifiers have achieved great success in visual recognition. However, real-world data is long-tailed by nature, leading to the mismatch between training and testing distributions. In this paper, we show that the Softmax function, though used in most classification tasks, gives a biased gradient estimation under the long-tailed setup. This paper presents Balanced Softmax, an elegant unbiased extension of Softmax, to accommodate the label distribution shift between training and testing. Theoretically, we derive the generalization bound for multiclass Softmax regression and show our loss minimizes the bound. In addition, we introduce Balanced Meta-Softmax, applying a complementary Meta Sampler to estimate the optimal class sample rate and further improve long-tailed learning. In our experiments, we demonstrate that Balanced Meta-Softmax outperforms state-of-the-art long-tailed classification solutions on both visual recognition and instance segmentation tasks.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Long-tail Learning | CIFAR-10-LT (ρ=10) | Balanced Softmax (BALMS) | Error Rate | 8.7 | #7 of 50 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Long-tail Learning | ImageNet-LT | BALMS | Top-1 Accuracy | 41.8 | #61 of 69 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Long-tail Learning | Places-LT | BALMS | Top-1 Accuracy | 38.7 | #23 of 29 | 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.
Methods
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