{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/on-the-effectiveness-of-out-of-distribution","title":"On the Effectiveness of Out-of-Distribution Data in Self-Supervised Long-Tail Learning","arxiv_id":"2306.04934","date":"2023-06-08","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jianhong Bai","Zuozhu Liu","Hualiang Wang","Jin Hao","Yang Feng","Huanpeng Chu","Haoji Hu"],"abstract":"Though Self-supervised learning (SSL) has been widely studied as a promising technique for representation learning, it doesn't generalize well on long-tailed datasets due to the majority classes dominating the feature space. Recent work shows that the long-tailed learning performance could be boosted by sampling extra in-domain (ID) data for self-supervised training, however, large-scale ID data which can rebalance the minority classes are expensive to collect. In this paper, we propose an alternative but easy-to-use and effective solution, Contrastive with Out-of-distribution (OOD) data for Long-Tail learning (COLT), which can effectively exploit OOD data to dynamically re-balance the feature space. We empirically identify the counter-intuitive usefulness of OOD samples in SSL long-tailed learning and principally design a novel SSL method. Concretely, we first localize the `head' and `tail' samples by assigning a tailness score to each OOD sample based on its neighborhoods in the feature space. Then, we propose an online OOD sampling strategy to dynamically re-balance the feature space. Finally, we enforce the model to be capable of distinguishing ID and OOD samples by a distribution-level supervised contrastive loss. Extensive experiments are conducted on various datasets and several state-of-the-art SSL frameworks to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that our method significantly improves the performance of SSL on long-tailed datasets by a large margin, and even outperforms previous work which uses external ID data. Our code is available at https://github.com/JianhongBai/COLT.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04934v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.04934v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"on-the-effectiveness-of-out-of-distribution","repo_url":"https://github.com/jianhongbai/colt","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"on-the-effectiveness-of-out-of-distribution","repo_url":"https://github.com/jianhongbai/bacon","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"long-tail-learning","task_name":"Long-tail Learning"},{"task_slug":"representation-learning","task_name":"Representation Learning"},{"task_slug":"self-supervised-learning","task_name":"Self-Supervised Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2306.04934","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2306.04934"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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