A Survey on Long-Tailed Visual Recognition

TL;DR

This survey reviews the challenges of long-tailed data distributions in visual recognition, summarizes datasets and methods, introduces the Gini coefficient for evaluation, and discusses future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of long-tailed visual recognition, categorizes existing methods, and introduces the Gini coefficient as a new evaluation metric.

Findings

Long-tailed phenomenon is widespread across datasets.

Existing studies are limited in addressing long-tailedness.

Gini coefficient effectively measures dataset imbalance.

Abstract

The heavy reliance on data is one of the major reasons that currently limit the development of deep learning. Data quality directly dominates the effect of deep learning models, and the long-tailed distribution is one of the factors affecting data quality. The long-tailed phenomenon is prevalent due to the prevalence of power law in nature. In this case, the performance of deep learning models is often dominated by the head classes while the learning of the tail classes is severely underdeveloped. In order to learn adequately for all classes, many researchers have studied and preliminarily addressed the long-tailed problem. In this survey, we focus on the problems caused by long-tailed data distribution, sort out the representative long-tailed visual recognition datasets and summarize some mainstream long-tailed studies. Specifically, we summarize these studies into ten categories from the perspective of representation learning, and outline the highlights and limitations of each category. Besides, we have studied four quantitative metrics for evaluating the imbalance, and suggest using the Gini coefficient to evaluate the long-tailedness of a dataset. Based on the Gini coefficient, we quantitatively study 20 widely-used and large-scale visual datasets proposed in the last decade, and find that the long-tailed phenomenon is widespread and has not been fully studied. Finally, we provide several future directions for the development of long-tailed learning to provide more ideas for readers.