# Feature Fusion from Head to Tail for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06963 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06963/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2023.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [Learning to Reweight Examples for Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09050/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Balanced Meta-Softmax for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10740/) (2020)
- [Long-tailed Recognition by Routing Diverse Distribution-Aware Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01809/) (2020)
- [Fast AutoAugment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00397/) (2019)
- [NormFace: L2 Hypersphere Embedding for Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06369/) (2017)
- [Parametric Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12028/) (2021)
- [Improving Calibration for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00466/) (2021)
- [Learning From Multiple Experts: Self-paced Knowledge Distillation for Long-tailed Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01536/) (2020)
- [Disentangling Label Distribution for Long-tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00321/) (2020)
- [Population Based Augmentation: Efficient Learning of Augmentation Policy Schedules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05393/) (2019)
- [Feature Space Augmentation for Long-Tailed Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03673/) (2020)
- [M2m: Imbalanced Classification via Major-to-minor Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00431/) (2020)
- [Deep Representation Learning on Long-tailed Data: A Learnable Embedding Augmentation Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10826/) (2020)
- [The Majority Can Help The Minority: Context-rich Minority Oversampling for Long-tailed Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00412/) (2021)
- [MetaSAug: Meta Semantic Augmentation for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12579/) (2021)
- [ResLT: Residual Learning for Long-tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10633/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [A Systematic Review on Long-Tailed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00483/) (2024)
- [Long-tailed Recognition with Model Rebalancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08177/) (2025)
- [Towards Heterogeneous Long-tailed Learning: Benchmarking, Metrics, and Toolbox](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08235/) (2023)
- [Long-Tail Learning with Rebalanced Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01753/) (2023)
- [Empowering Vision Transformers with Multi-Scale Causal Intervention for Long-Tailed Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08173/) (2025)
- [Reviving Undersampling for Long-Tailed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16811/) (2024)
- [CRMSP: A Semi-supervised Approach for Key Information Extraction with Class-Rebalancing and Merged Semantic Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15873/) (2024)
- [PAD-F: Prior-Aware Debiasing Framework for Long-Tailed X-ray Prohibited Item Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18078/) (2024)
- [Long-tailed Medical Diagnosis with Relation-aware Representation Learning and Iterative Classifier Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03238/) (2025)
- [Reframing Long-Tailed Learning via Loss Landscape Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21217/) (2026)
- [CARE: Class-Adaptive Expert Consensus for Reliable Learning with Long-Tailed Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23254/) (2026)
- [Long-Tailed Classification Based on Coarse-Grained Leading Forest and Multi-Center Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08206/) (2023)
- [PI-H2T: Enhancing Long-Tailed Visual Recognition with Permutation-Invariant and Head-to-Tail Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00625/) (2025)
- [Long-Tailed Learning for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06965/) (2025)
- [Mixture Experts with Test-Time Self-Supervised Aggregation for Tabular Imbalanced Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07033/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Contrastive Learning Using Out-Of-Distribution Data for Long-Tailed Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12698/) (2025)
- [Semantic-guided Fine-tuning of Foundation Model for Long-tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12807/) (2025)
- [Calibrating Biased Distribution in VFM-derived Latent Space via Cross-Domain Geometric Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13518/) (2025)
- [Gen2Balance: Generative Balancing for Long-Tailed Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22416/) (2026)
- [OFBD: Object-Focused Background Debiasing for Long-Tailed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37331/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The imbalanced distribution of long-tailed data presents a considerable challenge for deep learning models, as it causes them to prioritize the accurate classification of head classes but largely disregard tail classes. The biased decision boundary caused by inadequate semantic information in tail classes is one of the key factors contributing to their low recognition accuracy. To rectify this issue, we propose to augment tail classes by grafting the diverse semantic information from head classes, referred to as head-to-tail fusion (H2T). We replace a portion of feature maps from tail classes with those belonging to head classes. These fused features substantially enhance the diversity of tail classes. Both theoretical analysis and practical experimentation demonstrate that H2T can contribute to a more optimized solution for the decision boundary. We seamlessly integrate H2T in the classifier adjustment stage, making it a plug-and-play module. Its simplicity and ease of implementation allow for smooth integration with existing long-tailed recognition methods, facilitating a further performance boost. Extensive experiments on various long-tailed benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed H2T. The source code is available at https://github.com/Keke921/H2T.