# Optimizing for ROC Curves on Class-Imbalanced Data by Training over a Family of Loss Functions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05400 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05400/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01412/) (2020)
- [Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07413/) (2019)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [A systematic study of the class imbalance problem in convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05381/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Puzzle Mix: Exploiting Saliency and Local Statistics for Optimal Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06962/) (2020)
- [Improving Calibration for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00466/) (2021)
- [Distribution Alignment: A Unified Framework for Long-tail Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16370/) (2021)
- [Overcoming Classifier Imbalance for Long-tail Object Detection with Balanced Group Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10408/) (2020)
- [A Patient-Centric Dataset of Images and Metadata for Identifying Melanomas Using Clinical Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07360/) (2020)
- [Seesaw Loss for Long-Tailed Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10032/) (2020)
- [Balanced Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09052/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Learning based Hybrid Networks for Long-Tailed Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14267/) (2021)
- [The Devil is in Classification: A Simple Framework for Long-tail Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11978/) (2020)
- [Long-Tailed Recognition via Weight Balancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14197/) (2022)
- [Equalization Loss v2: A New Gradient Balance Approach for Long-tailed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08548/) (2020)
- [MetaSAug: Meta Semantic Augmentation for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12579/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Aggregation of Diverse Experts for Test-Agnostic Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09249/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Imbalanced Data Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.06783/) (2019)
- [Influence-Balanced Loss for Imbalanced Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02444/) (2021)
- [Balanced MSE for Imbalanced Visual Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16427/) (2022)
- [Identifying and Compensating for Feature Deviation in Imbalanced Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01385/) (2020)
- [FASA: Feature Augmentation and Sampling Adaptation for Long-Tailed Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12867/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although binary classification is a well-studied problem in computer vision, training reliable classifiers under severe class imbalance remains a challenging problem. Recent work has proposed techniques that mitigate the effects of training under imbalance by modifying the loss functions or optimization methods. While this work has led to significant improvements in the overall accuracy in the multi-class case, we observe that slight changes in hyperparameter values of these methods can result in highly variable performance in terms of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves on binary problems with severe imbalance. To reduce the sensitivity to hyperparameter choices and train more general models, we propose training over a family of loss functions, instead of a single loss function. We develop a method for applying Loss Conditional Training (LCT) to an imbalanced classification problem. Extensive experiment results, on both CIFAR and Kaggle competition datasets, show that our method improves model performance and is more robust to hyperparameter choices. Code is available at https://github.com/klieberman/roc_lct.