Papers › Trustworthy Long-Tailed Classification

Trustworthy Long-Tailed Classification

17 Nov 2021CVPR 2022 1arXiv:2111.09030archive 2025-07-28

Bolian Li, Zongbo Han, Haining Li, Huazhu Fu, Changqing Zhang

Classification on long-tailed distributed data is a challenging problem, which suffers from serious class-imbalance and accordingly unpromising performance especially on tail classes. Recently, the ensembling based methods achieve the state-of-the-art performance and show great potential. However, there are two limitations for current methods. First, their predictions are not trustworthy for failure-sensitive applications. This is especially harmful for the tail classes where the wrong predictions is basically frequent. Second, they assign unified numbers of experts to all samples, which is redundant for easy samples with excessive computational cost. To address these issues, we propose a Trustworthy Long-tailed Classification (TLC) method to jointly conduct classification and uncertainty estimation to identify hard samples in a multi-expert framework. Our TLC obtains the evidence-based uncertainty (EvU) and evidence for each expert, and then combines these uncertainties and evidences under the Dempster-Shafer Evidence Theory (DST). Moreover, we propose a dynamic expert engagement to reduce the number of engaged experts for easy samples and achieve efficiency while maintaining promising performances. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on the tasks of classification, tail detection, OOD detection and failure prediction. The experimental results show that the proposed TLC outperforms existing methods and is trustworthy with reliable uncertainty.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

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

Code

lblaoke/tlc officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

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

Tasks

ClassificationLong-tail LearningOut of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-10-LT (ρ=100) TLC (4 experts) Error Rate 19.6 #21 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-100-LT (ρ=100) TLC (4 Experts) Error Rate 50.2 #30 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