# Improving Tail-Class Representation with Centroid Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10048 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10048/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [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)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [BBN: Bilateral-Branch Network with Cumulative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02413/) (2019)
- [Hard Negative Mixing for Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01028/) (2020)
- [Large-Margin Softmax Loss for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02295/) (2016)
- [Long-tailed Recognition by Routing Diverse Distribution-Aware Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01809/) (2020)
- [Long-Tailed Classification by Keeping the Good and Removing the Bad Momentum Causal Effect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12991/) (2020)
- [Parametric Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12028/) (2021)
- [Rethinking the Value of Labels for Improving Class-Imbalanced Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07529/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Probabilistic Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06726/) (2024)
- [Generative AI for Synthetic Data Generation: Methods, Challenges and the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04190/) (2024)
- [Reviewing Labels: Label Graph Network with Top-k Prediction Set for Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14270/) (2022)
- [Enhanced Long-Tailed Recognition with Contrastive CutMix Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04911/) (2024)
- [Prior2Posterior: Model Prior Correction for Long-Tailed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16540/) (2024)
- [Class-Specific Branch Attention for Mitigating Gradient Interference under Class Imbalance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05740/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In vision domain, large-scale natural datasets typically exhibit long-tailed distribution which has large class imbalance between head and tail classes. This distribution poses difficulty in learning good representations for tail classes. Recent developments have shown good long-tailed model can be learnt by decoupling the training into representation learning and classifier balancing. However, these works pay insufficient consideration on the long-tailed effect on representation learning. In this work, we propose interpolative centroid contrastive learning (ICCL) to improve long-tailed representation learning. ICCL interpolates two images from a class-agnostic sampler and a class-aware sampler, and trains the model such that the representation of the interpolative image can be used to retrieve the centroids for both source classes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on multiple long-tailed image classification benchmarks. Our result shows a significant accuracy gain of 2.8% on the iNaturalist 2018 dataset with a real-world long-tailed distribution.