# Improving GANs for Long-Tailed Data through Group Spectral Regularization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.09932 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09932/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07413/) (2019)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [NVAE: A Deep Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03898/) (2020)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)
- [Conditional Image Synthesis With Auxiliary Classifier GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09585/) (2016)
- [Reliable Fidelity and Diversity Metrics for Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09797/) (2020)
- [BBN: Bilateral-Branch Network with Cumulative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02413/) (2019)
- [Differentiable Augmentation for Data-Efficient GAN Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10738/) (2020)
- [cGANs with Projection Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05637/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Value of Labels for Improving Class-Imbalanced Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07529/) (2020)
- [Spectral Norm Regularization for Improving the Generalizability of Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10941/) (2017)
- [Modulating early visual processing by language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00683/) (2017)
- [Mode Seeking Generative Adversarial Networks for Diverse Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05628/) (2019)
- [Consistency Regularization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12027/) (2019)
- [Regularizing Generative Adversarial Networks under Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03310/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Minority Oversampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09730/) (2019)
- [Improved Consistency Regularization for GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04724/) (2020)
- [Sliced Wasserstein Kernels for Probability Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03198/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [ITI-GEN: Inclusive Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05569/) (2023)
- [Class-Balancing Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00562/) (2023)
- [Fill-Up: Balancing Long-Tailed Data with Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07200/) (2023)
- [Improving Geo-diversity of Generated Images with Contextualized Vendi Score Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04551/) (2024)
- [Label-Noise Robust Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17517/) (2024)
- [DeiT-LT Distillation Strikes Back for Vision Transformer Training on Long-Tailed Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02900/) (2024)
- [NoisyTwins: Class-Consistent and Diverse Image Generation through StyleGANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05866/) (2023)
- [Taming the Tail in Class-Conditional GANs: Knowledge Sharing via Unconditional Training at Lower Resolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17065/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Generative AI for Urban Digital Twins: A Scoping Review on the Autonomous Generation of Urban Data, Scenarios, Designs, and 3D City Models for Smart City Advancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19464/) (2024)
- [Towards Heterogeneous Long-tailed Learning: Benchmarking, Metrics, and Toolbox](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08235/) (2023)
- [Diff-Oracle: Deciphering Oracle Bone Scripts with Controllable Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13631/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Conditional-Unconditional Alignment for Long-tailed Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09052/) (2025)
- [Reweighted Flow Matching via Unbalanced OT for Label-free Long-tailed Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25713/) (2025)
- [Fair GANs through model rebalancing for extremely imbalanced class distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08638/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep long-tailed learning aims to train useful deep networks on practical, real-world imbalanced distributions, wherein most labels of the tail classes are associated with a few samples. There has been a large body of work to train discriminative models for visual recognition on long-tailed distribution. In contrast, we aim to train conditional Generative Adversarial Networks, a class of image generation models on long-tailed distributions. We find that similar to recognition, state-of-the-art methods for image generation also suffer from performance degradation on tail classes. The performance degradation is mainly due to class-specific mode collapse for tail classes, which we observe to be correlated with the spectral explosion of the conditioning parameter matrix. We propose a novel group Spectral Regularizer (gSR) that prevents the spectral explosion alleviating mode collapse, which results in diverse and plausible image generation even for tail classes. We find that gSR effectively combines with existing augmentation and regularization techniques, leading to state-of-the-art image generation performance on long-tailed data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our regularizer on long-tailed datasets with different degrees of imbalance.