# A Survey on Long-Tailed Visual Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.13775 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13775/

## Key facts

- Cited by 75 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 143 of its 209 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 143)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [PandaLM: An Automatic Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Instruction Tuning Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05087/) (2023)
- [Gradient Reweighting: Towards Imbalanced Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18528/) (2024)
- [Exploring Vision-Language Models for Imbalanced Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01457/) (2023)
- [Fill-Up: Balancing Long-Tailed Data with Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07200/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Review on Long-Tailed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00483/) (2024)
- [Balancing Logit Variation for Long-tailed Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02061/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Residual Classifier for Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13305/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning Technique for Human Parsing: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00394/) (2023)
- [Fed-GraB: Federated Long-tailed Learning with Self-Adjusting Gradient Balancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07587/) (2023)
- [DebGCD: Debiased Learning with Distribution Guidance for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04804/) (2025)
- [NCL++: Nested Collaborative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16709/) (2023)
- [Long-Tailed Anomaly Detection with Learnable Class Names](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20236/) (2024)
- [Frontiers in Intelligent Colonoscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17241/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Deep Long-Tail Classification Advancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15593/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning Safety Concerns in Automated Driving Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03774/) (2023)
- [Geometric Prior Guided Feature Representation Learning for Long-Tailed Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11436/) (2024)
- [It Is All About Data: A Survey on the Effects of Data on Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09767/) (2023)
- [TextManiA: Enriching Visual Feature by Text-driven Manifold Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14611/) (2023)
- [Taming the Tail in Class-Conditional GANs: Knowledge Sharing via Unconditional Training at Lower Resolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17065/) (2024)
- [Taming the Long Tail in Human Mobility Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14970/) (2024)
- [From Head to Tail: Towards Balanced Representation in Large Vision-Language Models through Adaptive Data Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12821/) (2025)
- [Instance-Aware Repeat Factor Sampling for Long-Tailed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08069/) (2023)
- [Adjusting Logit in Gaussian Form for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10648/) (2023)
- [ECL: Class-Enhancement Contrastive Learning for Long-tailed Skin Lesion Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04136/) (2023)
- [Inverse Image Frequency for Long-tailed Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04861/) (2022)
- [Towards Heterogeneous Long-tailed Learning: Benchmarking, Metrics, and Toolbox](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08235/) (2023)
- [How does promoting the minority fraction affect generalization? A theoretical study of the one-hidden-layer neural network on group imbalance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07310/) (2024)
- [TAET: Two-Stage Adversarial Equalization Training on Long-Tailed Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01924/) (2025)
- [A Chain-of-thought Reasoning Breast Ultrasound Dataset Covering All Histopathology Categories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17046/) (2025)
- [Fractal Calibration for long-tailed object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11774/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The heavy reliance on data is one of the major reasons that currently limit the development of deep learning. Data quality directly dominates the effect of deep learning models, and the long-tailed distribution is one of the factors affecting data quality. The long-tailed phenomenon is prevalent due to the prevalence of power law in nature. In this case, the performance of deep learning models is often dominated by the head classes while the learning of the tail classes is severely underdeveloped. In order to learn adequately for all classes, many researchers have studied and preliminarily addressed the long-tailed problem. In this survey, we focus on the problems caused by long-tailed data distribution, sort out the representative long-tailed visual recognition datasets and summarize some mainstream long-tailed studies. Specifically, we summarize these studies into ten categories from the perspective of representation learning, and outline the highlights and limitations of each category. Besides, we have studied four quantitative metrics for evaluating the imbalance, and suggest using the Gini coefficient to evaluate the long-tailedness of a dataset. Based on the Gini coefficient, we quantitatively study 20 widely-used and large-scale visual datasets proposed in the last decade, and find that the long-tailed phenomenon is widespread and has not been fully studied. Finally, we provide several future directions for the development of long-tailed learning to provide more ideas for readers.