# Decoupled Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06151 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06151/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 26 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [General knowledge distillation methods](https://mlsanity.com/distill/general-knowledge-distillation-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Beyond Part Models: Person Retrieval with Refined Part Pooling (and a Strong Convolutional Baseline)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09349/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Parametric Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12028/) (2021)
- [Distribution Alignment: A Unified Framework for Long-tail Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16370/) (2021)
- [Balanced Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09052/) (2022)
- [Targeted Supervised Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13998/) (2021)
- [Part-based R-CNNs for Fine-grained Category Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.3867/) (2014)
- [Self-Supervised Aggregation of Diverse Experts for Test-Agnostic Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09249/) (2021)
- [Patch-level Representation Learning for Self-supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07990/) (2022)
- [Auto-ReID: Searching for a Part-aware ConvNet for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09776/) (2019)
- [BatchFormer: Learning to Explore Sample Relationships for Robust Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01522/) (2022)
- [Can Semantic Labels Assist Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08621/) (2020)
- [NCL++: Nested Collaborative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16709/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [VMAD: Visual-enhanced Multimodal Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20146/) (2024)
- [AMD: Adaptive Momentum and Decoupled Contrastive Learning Framework for Robust Long-Tail Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01801/) (2025)
- [Aligned Contrastive Loss for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01071/) (2025)
- [Class Unbiasing for Generalization in Medical Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06943/) (2025)
- [SAIL: Scene-aware Adaptive Iterative Learning for Long-Tail Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04573/) (2026)
- [A Strong Balanced-Softmax Classifier-Retraining Baseline for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09832/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Supervised Contrastive Loss (SCL) is popular in visual representation learning. Given an anchor image, SCL pulls two types of positive samples, i.e., its augmentation and other images from the same class together, while pushes negative images apart to optimize the learned embedding. In the scenario of long-tailed recognition, where the number of samples in each class is imbalanced, treating two types of positive samples equally leads to the biased optimization for intra-category distance. In addition, similarity relationship among negative samples, that are ignored by SCL, also presents meaningful semantic cues. To improve the performance on long-tailed recognition, this paper addresses those two issues of SCL by decoupling the training objective. Specifically, it decouples two types of positives in SCL and optimizes their relations toward different objectives to alleviate the influence of the imbalanced dataset. We further propose a patch-based self distillation to transfer knowledge from head to tail classes to relieve the under-representation of tail classes. It uses patch-based features to mine shared visual patterns among different instances and leverages a self distillation procedure to transfer such knowledge. Experiments on different long-tailed classification benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method. For instance, it achieves the 57.7% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet-LT dataset. Combined with the ensemble-based method, the performance can be further boosted to 59.7%, which substantially outperforms many recent works. The code is available at https://github.com/SY-Xuan/DSCL.