Range Loss for Deep Face Recognition with Long-tail

TL;DR

This paper introduces range loss, a novel loss function designed to improve deep face recognition on long-tail data distributions by reducing intra-personal variations and enlarging inter-personal differences within mini-batches.

Contribution

The paper proposes range loss, a new loss function that effectively utilizes long-tailed data for face recognition, outperforming existing methods that discard tail data.

Findings

Range loss improves face recognition accuracy on long-tail datasets.

The method demonstrates strong generalization on LFW and YTF benchmarks.

It effectively handles unbalanced class distributions in training data.

Abstract

Convolutional neural networks have achieved great improvement on face recognition in recent years because of its extraordinary ability in learning discriminative features of people with different identities. To train such a well-designed deep network, tremendous amounts of data is indispensable. Long tail distribution specifically refers to the fact that a small number of generic entities appear frequently while other objects far less existing. Considering the existence of long tail distribution of the real world data, large but uniform distributed data are usually hard to retrieve. Empirical experiences and analysis show that classes with more samples will pose greater impact on the feature learning process and inversely cripple the whole models feature extracting ability on tail part data. Contrary to most of the existing works that alleviate this problem by simply cutting the tailed data for uniform distributions across the classes, this paper proposes a new loss function called range loss to effectively utilize the whole long tailed data in training process. More specifically, range loss is designed to reduce overall intra-personal variations while enlarging inter-personal differences within one mini-batch simultaneously when facing even extremely unbalanced data. The optimization objective of range loss is the $k$ greatest range's harmonic mean values in one class and the shortest inter-class distance within one batch. Extensive experiments on two famous and challenging face recognition benchmarks (Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) and YouTube Faces (YTF) not only demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in overcoming the long tail effect but also show the good generalization ability of the proposed approach.