# Contrastive Learning based Hybrid Networks for Long-Tailed Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14267 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14267/

## Key facts

- Cited by 130 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07413/) (2019)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [Learning to Reweight Examples for Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09050/) (2018)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)
- [A systematic study of the class imbalance problem in convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05381/) (2017)
- [BBN: Bilateral-Branch Network with Cumulative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02413/) (2019)
- [Large-Margin Softmax Loss for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02295/) (2016)
- [Equalization Loss for Long-Tailed Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05176/) (2020)
- [Long-Tailed Classification by Keeping the Good and Removing the Bad Momentum Causal Effect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12991/) (2020)
- [What is the Effect of Importance Weighting in Deep Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03372/) (2018)
- [Cost Sensitive Learning of Deep Feature Representations from Imbalanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.03422/) (2015)
- [Rethinking Class-Balanced Methods for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition from a Domain Adaptation Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10780/) (2020)
- [Feature Space Augmentation for Long-Tailed Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03673/) (2020)
- [M2m: Imbalanced Classification via Major-to-minor Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00431/) (2020)
- [Deep Representation Learning on Long-tailed Data: A Learnable Embedding Augmentation Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10826/) (2020)
- [Relay Backpropagation for Effective Learning of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.05830/) (2015)
- [Generative Adversarial Minority Oversampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09730/) (2019)
- [Deep Imbalanced Attribute Classification using Visual Attention Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03903/) (2018)
- [Survey of resampling techniques for improving classification performance in unbalanced datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06048/) (2016)
- [To Balance or Not to Balance: A Simple-yet-Effective Approach for Learning with Long-Tailed Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04486/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 130)

- [Deep Long-Tailed Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04596/) (2021)
- [Balanced Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09052/) (2022)
- [Seeing What You Said: Talking Face Generation Guided by a Lip Reading Expert](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17480/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Aggregation of Diverse Experts for Test-Agnostic Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09249/) (2021)
- [FedProc: Prototypical Contrastive Federated Learning on Non-IID data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12273/) (2021)
- [UNICON: Combating Label Noise Through Uniform Selection and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14542/) (2022)
- [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)
- [VL-LTR: Learning Class-wise Visual-Linguistic Representation for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13579/) (2021)
- [Nested Collaborative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15359/) (2022)
- [Long-Tail Learning with Foundation Model: Heavy Fine-Tuning Hurts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10019/) (2023)
- [Probabilistic Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06726/) (2024)
- [Expanding Low-Density Latent Regions for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14911/) (2022)
- [Exploring Vision-Language Models for Imbalanced Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01457/) (2023)
- [Learning Imbalanced Data with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02015/) (2022)
- [LTGC: Long-tail Recognition via Leveraging LLMs-driven Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05854/) (2024)
- [Understanding Why Generalized Reweighting Does Not Improve Over ERM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12293/) (2022)
- [BatchFormer: Learning to Explore Sample Relationships for Robust Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01522/) (2022)
- [A Systematic Review on Long-Tailed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00483/) (2024)
- [ConGeo: Robust Cross-view Geo-localization across Ground View Variations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13965/) (2024)
- [Constructing Balance from Imbalance for Long-tailed Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02567/) (2022)
- [Imagine by Reasoning: A Reasoning-Based Implicit Semantic Data Augmentation for Long-Tailed Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07928/) (2021)
- [FairDisCo: Fairer AI in Dermatology via Disentanglement Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10013/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Hyperbolic Graph Embeddings via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08554/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Deep Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05306/) (2022)
- [Supervised Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01505/) (2023)
- [MDCS: More Diverse Experts with Consistency Self-distillation for Long-tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09922/) (2023)
- [ConR: Contrastive Regularizer for Deep Imbalanced Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06651/) (2023)
- [Margin Calibration for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07225/) (2021)
- [Towards Calibrated Hyper-Sphere Representation via Distribution Overlap Coefficient for Long-tailed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10043/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning discriminative image representations plays a vital role in long-tailed image classification because it can ease the classifier learning in imbalanced cases. Given the promising performance contrastive learning has shown recently in representation learning, in this work, we explore effective supervised contrastive learning strategies and tailor them to learn better image representations from imbalanced data in order to boost the classification accuracy thereon. Specifically, we propose a novel hybrid network structure being composed of a supervised contrastive loss to learn image representations and a cross-entropy loss to learn classifiers, where the learning is progressively transited from feature learning to the classifier learning to embody the idea that better features make better classifiers. We explore two variants of contrastive loss for feature learning, which vary in the forms but share a common idea of pulling the samples from the same class together in the normalized embedding space and pushing the samples from different classes apart. One of them is the recently proposed supervised contrastive (SC) loss, which is designed on top of the state-of-the-art unsupervised contrastive loss by incorporating positive samples from the same class. The other is a prototypical supervised contrastive (PSC) learning strategy which addresses the intensive memory consumption in standard SC loss and thus shows more promise under limited memory budget. Extensive experiments on three long-tailed classification datasets demonstrate the advantage of the proposed contrastive learning based hybrid networks in long-tailed classification.