A knowledge-guide hierarchical learning method for long-tailed image classification

Abstract Deep visual recognition methods have achieved excellent performance on artificially constructed image datasets where the data distribution is balanced. However, in real-world scenarios, data distribution is usually extremely imbalanced and exhibit a long-tailed distribution where data in each head class is more than the class in the tail. Many efficient deep learning methods fail to work normally, i.e., they perform well in the head class while poor in the tail class. In this paper, we propose a two-layer Hierarchical-Learning Long-Tailed Recognition (HL-LTR) algorithm which transforms the long-tailed problem into a hierarchical classification problem by constructing a hierarchical superclass tree in which each layer corresponds to a recognition task. In the first layer of the tree, the degree of data imbalance is largely decreased. The recognition task of the second layer is the original long-tailed recognition problem. The training of HL-LTR is top-down. The knowledge learned by the first layer transfers to classes of the second layer and guides the feature learning of the second layer by using attention mechanism module and knowledge distillation method. Compared with directly solving the most difficult long-tailed recognition task, HL-LTR achieves better performance due to its progressive learning method from easy to difficult and effective knowledge transfer strategy.