# Equalization Loss for Long-Tailed Object Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.05176 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05176/

## Key facts

- Cited by 285 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 285)

- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [Deep Long-Tailed Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04596/) (2021)
- [DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09788/) (2022)
- [Parametric Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12028/) (2021)
- [Distribution Alignment: A Unified Framework for Long-tail Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16370/) (2021)
- [MeMViT: Memory-Augmented Multiscale Vision Transformer for Efficient Long-Term Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08383/) (2022)
- [CReST: A Class-Rebalancing Self-Training Framework for Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09559/) (2021)
- [Towards Open Vocabulary Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15880/) (2023)
- [Reviving Iterative Training with Mask Guidance for Interactive Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06583/) (2021)
- [Balanced Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09052/) (2022)
- [Bipartite Graph Network with Adaptive Message Passing for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00308/) (2021)
- [Probabilistic two-stage detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07461/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning based Hybrid Networks for Long-Tailed Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14267/) (2021)
- [Simple multi-dataset detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13086/) (2021)
- [VideoPrism: A Foundational Visual Encoder for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13217/) (2024)
- [Animal Kingdom: A Large and Diverse Dataset for Animal Behavior Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08129/) (2022)
- [ResLT: Residual Learning for Long-tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10633/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Aggregation of Diverse Experts for Test-Agnostic Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09249/) (2021)
- [FASA: Feature Augmentation and Sampling Adaptation for Long-Tailed Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12867/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13775/) (2022)
- [Long-tailed Visual Recognition via Gaussian Clouded Logit Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11733/) (2023)
- [Label-Imbalanced and Group-Sensitive Classification under Overparameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01550/) (2021)
- [Self Supervision to Distillation for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04075/) (2021)
- [Distilling Virtual Examples for Long-tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15042/) (2021)
- [LPT: Long-tailed Prompt Tuning for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01033/) (2022)
- [VL-LTR: Learning Class-wise Visual-Linguistic Representation for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13579/) (2021)
- [DeepSMOTE: Fusing Deep Learning and SMOTE for Imbalanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02340/) (2021)
- [Nested Collaborative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15359/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object recognition techniques using convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved great success. However, state-of-the-art object detection methods still perform poorly on large vocabulary and long-tailed datasets, e.g. LVIS. In this work, we analyze this problem from a novel perspective: each positive sample of one category can be seen as a negative sample for other categories, making the tail categories receive more discouraging gradients. Based on it, we propose a simple but effective loss, named equalization loss, to tackle the problem of long-tailed rare categories by simply ignoring those gradients for rare categories. The equalization loss protects the learning of rare categories from being at a disadvantage during the network parameter updating. Thus the model is capable of learning better discriminative features for objects of rare classes. Without any bells and whistles, our method achieves AP gains of 4.1% and 4.8% for the rare and common categories on the challenging LVIS benchmark, compared to the Mask R-CNN baseline. With the utilization of the effective equalization loss, we finally won the 1st place in the LVIS Challenge 2019. Code has been made available at: https: //github.com/tztztztztz/eql.detectron2