# Delving into Semantic Scale Imbalance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.14613 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14613/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Deep Metric Learning via Lifted Structured Feature Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06452/) (2015)
- [Deep Long-Tailed Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04596/) (2021)
- [BBN: Bilateral-Branch Network with Cumulative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02413/) (2019)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [Balanced Meta-Softmax for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10740/) (2020)
- [Equalization Loss for Long-Tailed Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05176/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Learning From Multiple Experts: Self-paced Knowledge Distillation for Long-tailed Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01536/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Geometric Knowledge-Guided Localized Global Distribution Alignment for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06457/) (2025)
- [Geometric Prior Guided Feature Representation Learning for Long-Tailed Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11436/) (2024)
- [Long-tailed Recognition with Model Rebalancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08177/) (2025)
- [Predicting and Enhancing the Fairness of DNNs with the Curvature of Perceptual Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12307/) (2023)
- [Stable Neighbor Denoising for Source-free Domain Adaptive Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06813/) (2024)
- [Exploring Weight Balancing on Long-Tailed Recognition Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16573/) (2023)
- [Unveiling and Mitigating Generalized Biases of DNNs through the Intrinsic Dimensions of Perceptual Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13859/) (2024)
- [Orthogonal Uncertainty Representation of Data Manifold for Robust Long-Tailed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10090/) (2023)
- [Semantic Connectivity-Driven Pseudo-labeling for Cross-domain Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06331/) (2023)
- [Balanced Data, Imbalanced Spectra: Unveiling Class Disparities with Spectral Imbalance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11742/) (2024)
- [Data-Centric Long-Tailed Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01744/) (2023)
- [Exploring Beyond Logits: Hierarchical Dynamic Labeling Based on Embeddings for Semi-Supervised Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17173/) (2024)
- [Multiplicative Logit Adjustment Approximates Neural-Collapse-Aware Decision Boundary Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17582/) (2024)
- [Compositional Attribute Imbalance in Vision Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14418/) (2025)
- [Delving Aleatoric Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentation via Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10963/) (2026)
- [Geometric Origins of Bias in Deep Neural Networks: A Human Visual System Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11809/) (2025)
- [Deep Minimax Classifiers for Imbalanced Datasets with a Small Number of Minority Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16948/) (2025)
- [Reducing Class Bias In Data-Balanced Datasets Through Hardness-Based Resampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07031/) (2025)
- [Calibrating Biased Distribution in VFM-derived Latent Space via Cross-Domain Geometric Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13518/) (2025)
- [Optimizing Class Distributions for Bias-Aware Multi-Class Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11588/) (2025)
- [Intrinsic Dimensionality as a Model-Free Measure of Class Imbalance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10475/) (2025)
- [Information Density Imbalance in Visual Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02369/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Model bias triggered by long-tailed data has been widely studied. However, measure based on the number of samples cannot explicate three phenomena simultaneously: (1) Given enough data, the classification performance gain is marginal with additional samples. (2) Classification performance decays precipitously as the number of training samples decreases when there is insufficient data. (3) Model trained on sample-balanced datasets still has different biases for different classes. In this work, we define and quantify the semantic scale of classes, which is used to measure the feature diversity of classes. It is exciting to find experimentally that there is a marginal effect of semantic scale, which perfectly describes the first two phenomena. Further, the quantitative measurement of semantic scale imbalance is proposed, which can accurately reflect model bias on multiple datasets, even on sample-balanced data, revealing a novel perspective for the study of class imbalance. Due to the prevalence of semantic scale imbalance, we propose semantic-scale-balanced learning, including a general loss improvement scheme and a dynamic re-weighting training framework that overcomes the challenge of calculating semantic scales in real-time during iterations. Comprehensive experiments show that dynamic semantic-scale-balanced learning consistently enables the model to perform superiorly on large-scale long-tailed and non-long-tailed natural and medical datasets, which is a good starting point for mitigating the prevalent but unnoticed model bias.