# CUE: Concept-Aware Multi-Label Expansion to Mitigate Concept Confusion in Long-Tailed Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01309 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01309/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [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)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)
- [Deep Long-Tailed Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04596/) (2021)
- [Distribution Alignment: A Unified Framework for Long-tail Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16370/) (2021)
- [Disentangling Label Distribution for Long-tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00321/) (2020)
- [SoftMatch: Addressing the Quantity-Quality Trade-off in Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10921/) (2023)
- [Retrieval Augmented Classification for Long-Tail Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11233/) (2022)
- [ResLT: Residual Learning for Long-tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10633/) (2021)
- [Debiased Learning from Naturally Imbalanced Pseudo-Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01490/) (2022)
- [Long-tailed Visual Recognition via Gaussian Clouded Logit Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11733/) (2023)
- [LPT: Long-tailed Prompt Tuning for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01033/) (2022)
- [SimPLE: Similar Pseudo Label Exploitation for Semi-Supervised Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16725/) (2021)
- [VL-LTR: Learning Class-wise Visual-Linguistic Representation for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13579/) (2021)
- [Long-Tail Learning with Foundation Model: Heavy Fine-Tuning Hurts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10019/) (2023)
- [A Simple Long-Tailed Recognition Baseline via Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14745/) (2021)
- [CDUL: CLIP-Driven Unsupervised Learning for Multi-Label Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16634/) (2023)
- [How Re-sampling Helps for Long-Tail Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18236/) (2023)
- [Exploring Vision-Language Models for Imbalanced Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01457/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Long-tailed distributions are common in real-world recognition tasks, where a few head classes have many samples while most tail classes have very few. Recently, fine-tuning foundation models for long-tailed learning has gained attention due to their excellent performance. However, most existing methods focus solely on mitigating long-tailed distribution bias while overlooking concept confusion caused by the long-tailed distribution. In this paper, we study this problem and attribute it to the mutual exclusivity of single-label supervision under long-tailed distributions, which suppresses feature sharing among related classes and amplifies the dominance of head classes, leading to disrupted inter-class discriminability. To address this, we propose CUE, Concept-aware mUlti-label Expansion, which introduces multi-label concept signals to preserve disrupted inter-class relationships. Specifically, CUE constructs concept sets by (i) extracting instance-level visual cues from zero-shot CLIP and (ii) generating class-level semantic cues with LLM; the two cues are incorporated via separately weighted Binary Logit-Adjustment (BLA) auxiliary losses and jointly optimized with the baseline Logit-Adjustment (LA) loss. Experiments on several long-tailed benchmarks, CUE achieves balanced and strong performance, surpassing recent state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhangruichi/CUE.