# Learning from Reduced Labels for Long-Tailed Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16469 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16469/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [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)
- [A systematic study of the class imbalance problem in convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05381/) (2017)
- [A Survey of Autonomous Driving: Common Practices and Emerging Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05113/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Value of Labels for Improving Class-Imbalanced Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07529/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02410/) (2016)
- [CoMatch: Semi-supervised Learning with Contrastive Graph Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11183/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Class-Balanced Methods for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition from a Domain Adaptation Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10780/) (2020)
- [SimMatch: Semi-supervised Learning with Similarity Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06915/) (2022)
- [Distribution Aligning Refinery of Pseudo-label for Imbalanced Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08844/) (2020)
- [Progressive Identification of True Labels for Partial-Label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08053/) (2020)
- [Provably Consistent Partial-Label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08929/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13025/) (2019)
- [ME-Net: Towards Effective Adversarial Robustness with Matrix Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11971/) (2019)
- [ABC: Auxiliary Balanced Classifier for Class-imbalanced Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10368/) (2021)
- [Deep Over-sampling Framework for Classifying Imbalanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07515/) (2017)
- [Data Augmentation Revisited: Rethinking the Distribution Gap between Clean and Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09148/) (2019)
- [Improving Contrastive Learning on Imbalanced Seed Data via Open-World Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01004/) (2021)
- [Barely-Supervised Learning: Semi-Supervised Learning with very few labeled images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12004/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Learning from True-False Labels via Multi-modal Prompt Retrieving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15228/) (2024)
- [Human-Corrected Labels Learning: Enhancing Labels Quality via Human Correction of VLMs Discrepancies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09063/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Long-tailed data is prevalent in real-world classification tasks and heavily relies on supervised information, which makes the annotation process exceptionally labor-intensive and time-consuming. Unfortunately, despite being a common approach to mitigate labeling costs, existing weakly supervised learning methods struggle to adequately preserve supervised information for tail samples, resulting in a decline in accuracy for the tail classes. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a novel weakly supervised labeling setting called Reduced Label. The proposed labeling setting not only avoids the decline of supervised information for the tail samples, but also decreases the labeling costs associated with long-tailed data. Additionally, we propose an straightforward and highly efficient unbiased framework with strong theoretical guarantees to learn from these Reduced Labels. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets including ImageNet validate the effectiveness of our approach, surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods.