mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

AUC Maximization in the Era of Big Data and AI: A Survey

arXiv 2203.15046 ↗First posted 28 Mar 2022cs.LG cs.AI math.OCcited by 100

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Cited by 24 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Area under the ROC curve, a.k.a. AUC, is a measure of choice for assessing the performance of a classifier for imbalanced data. AUC maximization refers to a learning paradigm that learns a predictive model by directly maximizing its AUC score. It has been studied for more than two decades dating back to late 90s and a huge amount of work has been devoted to AUC maximization since then. Recently, stochastic AUC maximization for big data and deep AUC maximization for deep learning have received increasing attention and yielded dramatic impact for solving real-world problems. However, to the best our knowledge there is no comprehensive survey of related works for AUC maximization. This paper aims to address the gap by reviewing the literature in the past two decades. We not only give a holistic view of the literature but also present detailed explanations and comparisons of different papers from formulations to algorithms and theoretical guarantees. We also identify and discuss remaining and emerging issues for deep AUC maximization, and provide suggestions on topics for future work.

Key facts. Cited by 100 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 78 of its 212 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2022.

Builds on

78 of 212 references.

References · 78

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38 more
  1. 2019Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networkscited by 964
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  22. 2019Interpretable Image Recognition with Hierarchical Prototypescited by 64
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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 12; 2023: 22; 2024: 25; 2025: 30; 2026: 11.

100 papers.

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  1. 2023How Can Recommender Systems Benefit from Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 141
  2. 2024Dynamical Regimes of Diffusion Modelscited by 133
  3. 2023DiffPoseTalk: Speech-Driven Stylistic 3D Facial Animation and Head Pose Generation via Diffusion Modelscited by 81
  4. 2023A Survey on Uncertainty Quantification Methods for Deep Learningcited by 78
  5. 2024A Survey on Diffusion Models for Time Series and Spatio-Temporal Datacited by 66
  6. 2023CoCoGen: Physically-Consistent and Conditioned Score-based Generative Models for Forward and Inverse Problemscited by 54
  7. 2022OpenAUC: Towards AUC-Oriented Open-Set Recognitioncited by 33
  8. 2022Rank-based Decomposable Losses in Machine Learning: A Surveycited by 26
  9. 2023Diffusion Models as Stochastic Quantization in Lattice Field Theorycited by 24
  10. 2022Near-Optimal Algorithms for Making the Gradient Small in Stochastic Minimax Optimizationcited by 19
  11. 2024A Training-Free Conditional Diffusion Model for Learning Stochastic Dynamical Systemscited by 19
  12. 2023On the Theories Behind Hard Negative Sampling for Recommendationcited by 18
38 more
  1. 2024AUCSeg: AUC-oriented Pixel-level Long-tail Semantic Segmentationcited by 18
  2. 2023Counterfactual Generative Models for Time-Varying Treatmentscited by 17
  3. 2022Minimax AUC Fairness: Efficient Algorithm with Provable Convergencecited by 16
  4. 2025DisCO: Reinforcing Large Reasoning Models with Discriminative Constrained Optimizationcited by 16
  5. 2023LibAUC: A Deep Learning Library for X-Risk Optimizationcited by 15
  6. 2024SIDBench: A Python Framework for Reliably Assessing Synthetic Image Detection Methodscited by 14
  7. 2025Flow Matching Meets Biology and Life Science: A Surveycited by 14
  8. 2022AUC-based Selective Classificationcited by 13
  9. 2025OpenworldAUC: Towards Unified Evaluation and Optimization for Open-world Prompt Tuningcited by 12
  10. 2022Multi-block Min-max Bilevel Optimization with Applications in Multi-task Deep AUC Maximizationcited by 11
  11. 2023Weakly Supervised AUC Optimization: A Unified Partial AUC Approachcited by 11
  12. 2025Physics-Informed Representation Alignment for Sparse Radio-Map Reconstructioncited by 11
  13. 2022FeDXL: Provable Federated Learning for Deep X-Risk Optimizationcited by 10
  14. 2023Non-Smooth Weakly-Convex Finite-sum Coupled Compositional Optimizationcited by 10
  15. 2022The Minority Matters: A Diversity-Promoting Collaborative Metric Learning Algorithmcited by 9
  16. 2024Improved Diversity-Promoting Collaborative Metric Learning for Recommendationcited by 9
  17. 2025Physics-Conditioned Diffusion Models for Lattice Gauge Theorycited by 9
  18. 2025Artificial intelligence for representing and characterizing quantum systemscited by 9
  19. 2022Score-based denoising for atomic structure identificationcited by 7
  20. 2024Token-level Proximal Policy Optimization for Query Generationcited by 7
  21. 2026Computational Hermeneutics: Evaluating generative AI as a cultural technologycited by 7
  22. 2024Diverse Intra- and Inter-Domain Activity Style Fusion for Cross-Person Generalization in Activity Recognitioncited by 6
  23. 2024Generative prediction of flow fields around an obstacle using the diffusion modelcited by 6
  24. 2024Discrete generative diffusion models without stochastic differential equations: a tensor network approachcited by 6
  25. 2024Mixed-State Quantum Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelcited by 6
  26. 2022Asymptotically Unbiased Instance-wise Regularized Partial AUC Optimization: Theory and Algorithmcited by 5
  27. 2023DetOFA: Efficient Training of Once-for-All Networks for Object Detection Using Path Filtercited by 5
  28. 2023Robust Educational Dialogue Act Classifiers with Low-Resource and Imbalanced Datasetscited by 5
  29. 2024Bridging User Dynamics: Transforming Sequential Recommendations with Schr"odinger Bridge and Diffusion Modelscited by 5
  30. 2025Improved Rates of Differentially Private Nonconvex-Strongly-Concave Minimax Optimizationcited by 5
  31. 2025Simulating the Unseen: Crash Prediction Must Learn from What Did Not Happencited by 5
  32. 2025A Generative Diffusion Model for Amorphous Materialscited by 5
  33. 2024Single-Loop Stochastic Algorithms for Difference of Max-Structured Weakly Convex Functionscited by 4
  34. 2024GazeFusion: Saliency-Guided Image Generationcited by 4
  35. 2024Federated Learning Client Pruning for Noisy Labelscited by 4
  36. 2024InvDiff: Invariant Guidance for Bias Mitigation in Diffusion Modelscited by 4
  37. 2025Exploring Preference-Guided Diffusion Model for Cross-Domain Recommendationcited by 4
  38. 2025CoFi-Dec: Hallucination-Resistant Decoding via Coarse-to-Fine Generative Feedback in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 4

50 most cited of 100 All 100 (JSON)