# Learning from Neighbors: Category Extrapolation for Long-Tail Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15980 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15980/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2024.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [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)
- [BBN: Bilateral-Branch Network with Cumulative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02413/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Remix: Rebalanced Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03943/) (2020)
- [Balanced Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09052/) (2022)
- [Long-Tailed Recognition via Weight Balancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14197/) (2022)
- [Retrieval Augmented Classification for Long-Tail Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11233/) (2022)
- [The Majority Can Help The Minority: Context-rich Minority Oversampling for Long-tailed Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00412/) (2021)
- [Distributional Robustness Loss for Long-tail Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03066/) (2021)
- [Distilling Virtual Examples for Long-tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15042/) (2021)
- [LPT: Long-tailed Prompt Tuning for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01033/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Aligning Effective Tokens with Video Anomaly in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06350/) (2025)
- [LIFT+: Lightweight Fine-Tuning for Long-Tail Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13282/) (2025)
- [Decision Boundary-aware Generation for Long-tailed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01468/) (2026)
- [PI-H2T: Enhancing Long-Tailed Visual Recognition with Permutation-Invariant and Head-to-Tail Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00625/) (2025)
- [Learning to See through Illumination Extremes with Event Streaming in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27558/) (2026)
- [SciLT: Long-tailed Image Classification under Scientific Image Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03687/) (2026)
- [Gen2Balance: Generative Balancing for Long-Tailed Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22416/) (2026)
- [Recurrent Contrastive Learning for Imbalanced Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03304/) (2026)
- [OFBD: Object-Focused Background Debiasing for Long-Tailed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37331/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Balancing training on long-tail data distributions remains a long-standing challenge in deep learning. While methods such as re-weighting and re-sampling help alleviate the imbalance issue, limited sample diversity continues to hinder models from learning robust and generalizable feature representations, particularly for tail classes. In contrast to existing methods, we offer a novel perspective on long-tail learning, inspired by an observation: datasets with finer granularity tend to be less affected by data imbalance. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon through both quantitative and qualitative studies, showing that increased granularity enhances the generalization of learned features in tail categories. Motivated by these findings, we propose a method to increase dataset granularity through category extrapolation. Specifically, we introduce open-set auxiliary classes that are visually similar to existing ones, aiming to enhance representation learning for both head and tail classes. This forms the core contribution and insight of our approach. To automate the curation of auxiliary data, we leverage large language models (LLMs) as knowledge bases to search for auxiliary categories and retrieve relevant images through web crawling. To prevent the overwhelming presence of auxiliary classes from disrupting training, we introduce a neighbor-silencing loss that encourages the model to focus on class discrimination within the target dataset. During inference, the classifier weights for auxiliary categories are masked out, leaving only the target class weights for use. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on three standard long-tail benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, notably outperforming strong baseline methods that use the same amount of data. The code will be made publicly available.