The goal in label-imbalanced and group-sensitive classification is to optimize relevant metrics such as balanced error and equal opportunity. Classical methods, such as weighted cross-entropy, fail when training deep nets to the terminal phase of training (TPT), that is training beyond zero training error. This observation has motivated recent flurry of activity in developing heuristic alternatives following the intuitive mechanism of promoting larger margin for minorities. In contrast to previous heuristics, we follow a principled analysis explaining how different loss adjustments affect margins. First, we prove that for all linear classifiers trained in TPT, it is necessary to introduce multiplicative, rather than additive, logit adjustments so that the interclass margins change appropriately. To show this, we discover a connection of the multiplicative CE modification to the cost-sensitive support-vector machines. Perhaps counterintuitively, we also find that, at the start of training, the same multiplicative weights can actually harm the minority classes. Thus, while additive adjustments are ineffective in the TPT, we show that they can speed up convergence by countering the initial negative effect of the multiplicative weights. Motivated by these findings, we formulate the vector-scaling (VS) loss, that captures existing techniques as special cases. Moreover, we introduce a natural extension of the VS-loss to group-sensitive classification, thus treating the two common types of imbalances (label/group) in a unifying way. Importantly, our experiments on state-of-the-art datasets are fully consistent with our theoretical insights and confirm the superior performance of our algorithms. Finally, for imbalanced Gaussian-mixtures data, we perform a generalization analysis, revealing tradeoffs between balanced / standard error and equal opportunity.
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)(韩国科学技术院);Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology(三星综合技术院);AItrics
While semi-supervised learning (SSL) has proven to be a promising way for leveraging unlabeled data when labeled data is scarce, the existing SSL algorithms typically assume that training class distributions are balanced. However, these SSL algorithms trained under imbalanced class distributions can severely suffer when generalizing to a balanced testing criterion, since they utilize biased pseudo-labels of unlabeled data toward majority classes. To alleviate this issue, we formulate a convex optimization problem to softly refine the pseudo-labels generated from the biased model, and develop a…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology(麻省理工学院);EECS(电气工程与计算机科学系(麻省理工学院))
Real-world data often exhibits long-tailed distributions with heavy class imbalance, posing great challenges for deep recognition models. We identify a persisting dilemma on the value of labels in the context of imbalanced learning: on the one hand, supervision from labels typically leads to better results than its unsupervised counterparts; on the other hand, heavily imbalanced data naturally incurs "label bias" in the classifier, where the decision boundary can be drastically altered by the majority classes. In this work, we systematically investigate these two facets of labels. We demonstra…
University of California, Riverside(加州大学河滨分校);University of Southern California(南加州大学)
Many modern neural network architectures are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Sufficiently overparameterized neural network architectures in principle have the capacity to fit any set of labels including random noise. However, given the highly nonconvex nature of the training landscape it is not clear what level and kind of overparameterization is required for first order methods to converge to a global optima that perfectly interpolate any labels. A number of recent theoretical works have shown that for very wide…
Rutgers University - New Brunswick(罗格斯大学新布朗斯维克分校);Weifang Medical University(潍坊医学院)
The paper presents Imbalance-XGBoost, a Python package that combines the powerful XGBoost software with weighted and focal losses to tackle binary label-imbalanced classification tasks. Though a small-scale program in terms of size, the package is, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first of its kind which provides an integrated implementation for the two losses on XGBoost and brings a general-purpose extension on XGBoost for label-imbalanced scenarios. In this paper, the design and usage of the package are described with exemplar code listings, and its convenience to be integrated int…
Learning against label noise is a vital topic to guarantee a reliable performance for deep neural networks. Recent research usually refers to dynamic noise modeling with model output probabilities and loss values, and then separates clean and noisy samples. These methods have gained notable success. However, unlike cherry-picked data, existing approaches often cannot perform well when facing imbalanced datasets, a common scenario in the real world. We thoroughly investigate this phenomenon and point out two major issues that hinder the performance, i.e., \emph{inter-class loss distribution dis…
University of Granada(格拉纳达大学);University of Jaén(哈恩大学)
Multilabel classification is an emergent data mining task with a broad range of real world applications. Learning from imbalanced multilabel data is being deeply studied latterly, and several resampling methods have been proposed in the literature. The unequal label distribution in most multilabel datasets, with disparate imbalance levels, could be a handicap while learning new classifiers. In addition, this characteristic challenges many of the existent preprocessing algorithms. Furthermore, the concurrence between imbalanced labels can make harder the learning from certain labels. These are …
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学人工智能学院);NLPR, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室)
Partial-label learning (PLL) is an important branch of weakly supervised learning where the single ground truth resides in a set of candidate labels, while the research rarely considers the label imbalance. A recent study for imbalanced partial-Label learning proposed that the combinatorial challenge of partial-label learning and long-tail learning lies in matching between a decent marginal prior distribution with drawing the pseudo labels. However, we believe that even if the pseudo label matches the prior distribution, the tail classes will still be difficult to learn because the total weigh…
Predicting the subcellular localization of proteins is an important and challenging problem. Traditional experimental approaches are often expensive and time-consuming. Consequently, a growing number of research efforts employ a series of machine learning approaches to predict the subcellular location of proteins. There are two main challenges among the state-of-the-art prediction methods. First, most of the existing techniques are designed to deal with multi-class rather than multi-label classification, which ignores connections between multiple labels. In reality, multiple locations of parti…
Network Embedding with Completely-imbalanced Labels
Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology Beijing(计算机科学与技术系,北京科技大学);School of Software, Tsinghua University(软件学院,清华大学);Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago(计算机科学系,伊利诺伊大学香槟分校)
Transductive graph-based semi-supervised learning methods usually build an undirected graph utilizing both labeled and unlabeled samples as vertices. Those methods propagate label information of labeled samples to neighbors through their edges in order to get the predicted labels of unlabeled samples. Most popular semi-supervised learning approaches are sensitive to initial label distribution happened in imbalanced labeled datasets. The class boundary will be severely skewed by the majority classes in an imbalanced classification. In this paper, we proposed a simple and effective approach to a…
Modern systems that rely on Machine Learning (ML) for predictive modelling, may suffer from the cold-start problem: supervised models work well but, initially, there are no labels, which are costly or slow to obtain. This problem is even worse in imbalanced data scenarios, where labels of the positive class take longer to accumulate. We propose an Active Learning (AL) system for datasets with orders of magnitude of class imbalance, in a cold start streaming scenario. We present a computationally efficient Outlier-based Discriminative AL approach (ODAL) and design a novel 3-stage sequence of AL…
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago(芝加哥丰田技术研究院);University of Chicago(芝加哥大学)
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) has shown excellent performance in a variety of machine learning tasks. This manuscript presents Deep Convolutional Neural Fields (DeepCNF), a combination of DCNN with Conditional Random Field (CRF), for sequence labeling with highly imbalanced label distribution. The widely-used training methods, such as maximum-likelihood and maximum labelwise accuracy, do not work well on highly imbalanced data. To handle this, we present a new training algorithm called maximum-AUC for DeepCNF. That is, we train DeepCNF by directly maximizing the empirical Area Unde…
Stanford University(斯坦福大学);Harvard University(哈佛大学);Toyota Research Institute(丰田研究所)
Real-world large-scale datasets are heteroskedastic and imbalanced -- labels have varying levels of uncertainty and label distributions are long-tailed. Heteroskedasticity and imbalance challenge deep learning algorithms due to the difficulty of distinguishing among mislabeled, ambiguous, and rare examples. Addressing heteroskedasticity and imbalance simultaneously is under-explored. We propose a data-dependent regularization technique for heteroskedastic datasets that regularizes different regions of the input space differently. Inspired by the theoretical derivation of the optimal regulariza…
School of Information Science and Engineering(信息科学与工程学院);Shandong University(山东大学)
Class imbalance, which is also called long-tailed distribution, is a common problem in classification tasks based on machine learning. If it happens, the minority data will be overwhelmed by the majority, which presents quite a challenge for data science. To address the class imbalance problem, researchers have proposed lots of methods: some people make the data set balanced (SMOTE), some others refine the loss function (Focal Loss), and even someone has noticed the value of labels influences class-imbalanced learning (Yang and Xu. Rethinking the value of labels for improving class-imbalanced …
Conformal Inference for Open-Set and Imbalanced Classification
Department of Data Sciences and Operations, University of Southern California, USA(美国南加州大学数据科学与运营系);Department of Statistics, University of California, Irvine, USA(美国加州大学伊尔弗斯分校统计系);Dipartimento di Scienze Economico-Sociali e Matematico-Statistiche, Università di Torino and Collegio Carlo Alberto, Italy(意大利都灵大学经济与社会科学系和卡尔罗·阿尔贝托学院);Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, USA(美国南加州大学计算机科学系)
Stanford University(斯坦福大学);Toyota Research Institute(丰田研究院)
Deep learning algorithms can fare poorly when the training dataset suffers from heavy class-imbalance but the testing criterion requires good generalization on less frequent classes. We design two novel methods to improve performance in such scenarios. First, we propose a theoretically-principled label-distribution-aware margin (LDAM) loss motivated by minimizing a margin-based generalization bound. This loss replaces the standard cross-entropy objective during training and can be applied with prior strategies for training with class-imbalance such as re-weighting or re-sampling. Second, we pr…
Uncertainty-aware Pseudo-label Selection for Positive-Unlabeled Learning
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München(慕尼黑大学);Helmholtz Zentrum München—German Research Center for Environmental Health(亥姆霍兹慕尼黑中心——德国环境健康研究中心);Munich Center for Machine Learning(慕尼黑机器学习中心);Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS(弗劳恩霍夫集成电路研究所);Technical University of Munich(慕尼黑工业大学)
Nanjing University(南京大学);Tencent AI Lab(腾讯人工智能实验室)
Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) has attracted significant attention from the research community. Many recent LNL methods rely on the assumption that clean samples tend to have "small loss". However, this assumption always fails to generalize to some real-world cases with imbalanced subpopulations, i.e., training subpopulations varying in sample size or recognition difficulty. Therefore, recent LNL methods face the risk of misclassifying those "informative" samples (e.g., hard samples or samples in the tail subpopulations) into noisy samples, leading to poor generalization performance. To addr…
AGH University of Science and Technology(AGH科技大学);Wrocław University of Science and Technology(弗罗茨瓦夫理工大学);Virginia Commonwealth University(弗吉尼亚联邦大学)
The imbalanced data classification is one of the most crucial tasks facing modern data analysis. Especially when combined with other difficulty factors, such as the presence of noise, overlapping class distributions, and small disjuncts, data imbalance can significantly impact the classification performance. Furthermore, some of the data difficulty factors are known to affect the performance of the existing oversampling strategies, in particular SMOTE and its derivatives. This effect is especially pronounced in the multi-class setting, in which the mutual imbalance relationships between the cl…
Multilingual models are parameter-efficient and especially effective in improving low-resource languages by leveraging crosslingual transfer. Despite recent advance in massive multilingual translation with ever-growing model and data, how to effectively train multilingual models has not been well understood. In this paper, we show that a common situation in multilingual training, data imbalance among languages, poses optimization tension between high resource and low resource languages where the found multilingual solution is often sub-optimal for low resources. We show that common training me…
Xi’an Jiaotong University(西安交通大学);Xidian University(西安电子科技大学);City University of Hong Kong(香港城市大学);Macau University of Science and Technology(澳门科技大学);Peng Cheng Laboratory(鹏城实验室)
Pseudo-labeling has proven to be a promising semi-supervised learning (SSL) paradigm. Existing pseudo-labeling methods commonly assume that the class distributions of training data are balanced. However, such an assumption is far from realistic scenarios and thus severely limits the performance of current pseudo-labeling methods under the context of class-imbalance. To alleviate this problem, we design a bias adaptive classifier that targets the imbalanced SSL setups. The core idea is to automatically assimilate the training bias caused by class imbalance via the bias adaptive classifier, whic…
Pseudo-labels are confident predictions made on unlabeled target data by a classifier trained on labeled source data. They are widely used for adapting a model to unlabeled data, e.g., in a semi-supervised learning setting. Our key insight is that pseudo-labels are naturally imbalanced due to intrinsic data similarity, even when a model is trained on balanced source data and evaluated on balanced target data. If we address this previously unknown imbalanced classification problem arising from pseudo-labels instead of ground-truth training labels, we could remove model biases towards false majo…
Recent state-of-the-art methods in imbalanced semi-supervised learning (SSL) rely on confidence-based pseudo-labeling with consistency regularization. To obtain high-quality pseudo-labels, a high confidence threshold is typically adopted. However, it has been shown that softmax-based confidence scores in deep networks can be arbitrarily high for samples far from the training data, and thus, the pseudo-labels for even high-confidence unlabeled samples may still be unreliable. In this work, we present a new perspective of pseudo-labeling for imbalanced SSL. Without relying on model confidence, w…
Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning via Label Refinement and Threshold Adjustment
College of Biomedical Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai, China(复旦大学生物医学工程学院,上海,中国);FMRIB Centre, Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (OxCIN), University of Oxford, Oxford, UK(牛津大学FMRIB研究中心,牛津大学整合神经影像中心(OxCIN),牛津,英国);School of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK(谢菲尔德大学计算机科学学院,谢菲尔德,英国);Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK(牛津大学工程科学系,牛津,英国)
Active Label Refinement for Robust Training of Imbalanced Medical Image Classification Tasks in the Presence of High Label Noise
Center for Imaging Science, Rochester Institute of Technology(罗切斯特理工学院成像科学中心);University of Aberdeen(阿伯丁大学);Biomedical Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology(罗切斯特理工学院生物医学工程系)
Sun Yat-Sen University(中山大学);Boston University(波士顿大学);MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab(麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室)
Unsupervised domain adaptation is a promising way to generalize deep models to novel domains. However, the current literature assumes that the label distribution is domain-invariant and only aligns the feature distributions or vice versa. In this work, we explore the more realistic task of Class-imbalanced Domain Adaptation: How to align feature distributions across domains while the label distributions of the two domains are also different? Taking a practical step towards this problem, we constructed the first benchmark with 22 cross-domain tasks from 6real-image datasets. We conducted compre…
With the abundance of industrial datasets, imbalanced classification has become a common problem in several application domains. Oversampling is an effective method to solve imbalanced classification. One of the main challenges of the existing oversampling methods is to accurately label the new synthetic samples. Inaccurate labels of the synthetic samples would distort the distribution of the dataset and possibly worsen the classification performance. This paper introduces the idea of weakly supervised learning to handle the inaccurate labeling of synthetic samples caused by traditional oversa…
Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology(卢森堡科学技术研究所);University of Geneva(日内瓦大学)
We present novel active learning strategies dedicated to providing a solution to the cold start stage, i.e. initializing the classification of a large set of data with no attached labels. Moreover, proposed strategies are designed to handle an imbalanced context in which random selection is highly inefficient. Specifically, our active learning iterations address label scarcity and imbalance using element scores, combining information extracted from a clustering structure to a label propagation model. The strategy is illustrated by a case study on annotating Twitter content w.r.t. testimonies o…
Simon Fraser University(西蒙弗雷泽大学);Borealis AI(Borealis人工智能研究院)
Data imbalance, in which a plurality of the data samples come from a small proportion of labels, poses a challenge in training deep neural networks. Unlike classification, in regression the labels are continuous, potentially boundless, and form a natural ordering. These distinct features of regression call for new techniques that leverage the additional information encoded in label-space relationships. This paper presents the RankSim (ranking similarity) regularizer for deep imbalanced regression, which encodes an inductive bias that samples that are closer in label space should also be closer…
The capability of the traditional semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods is far from real-world application due to severely biased pseudo-labels caused by (1) class imbalance and (2) class distribution mismatch between labeled and unlabeled data. This paper addresses such a relatively under-explored problem. First, we propose a general pseudo-labeling framework that class-adaptively blends the semantic pseudo-label from a similarity-based classifier to the linear one from the linear classifier, after making the observation that both types of pseudo-labels have complementary properties in terms…
TCG Crest Kolkata, India(印度加尔各答TCG Crest);School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland(爱尔兰都柏林大学学院计算机科学学院);Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata, India(印度统计研究所加尔各答分所)
There is often a mixture of very frequent labels and very infrequent labels in multi-label datatsets. This variation in label frequency, a type class imbalance, creates a significant challenge for building efficient multi-label classification algorithms. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing a minority class oversampling scheme, UCLSO, which integrates Unsupervised Clustering and Label-Specific data Oversampling. Clustering is performed to find out the key distinct and locally connected regions of a multi-label dataset (irrespective of the label information). Next, for each label,…
Zhejiang University(浙江大学);University of Wisconsin-Madison(威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校);Chongqing University(重庆大学);RIKEN(理化学研究所)
Partial-label learning (PLL) is a peculiar weakly-supervised learning task where the training samples are generally associated with a set of candidate labels instead of single ground truth. While a variety of label disambiguation methods have been proposed in this domain, they normally assume a class-balanced scenario that may not hold in many real-world applications. Empirically, we observe degenerated performance of the prior methods when facing the combinatorial challenge from the long-tailed distribution and partial-labeling. In this work, we first identify the major reasons that the prior…
MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory(麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室);Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University(罗格斯大学计算机科学系)
Real-world data often exhibit imbalanced distributions, where certain target values have significantly fewer observations. Existing techniques for dealing with imbalanced data focus on targets with categorical indices, i.e., different classes. However, many tasks involve continuous targets, where hard boundaries between classes do not exist. We define Deep Imbalanced Regression (DIR) as learning from such imbalanced data with continuous targets, dealing with potential missing data for certain target values, and generalizing to the entire target range. Motivated by the intrinsic difference betw…
The University of Chicago(芝加哥大学);Northwestern University(西北大学);The University of Chicago Booth School of Business(芝加哥大学布斯商学院)
Training a classifier under non-convex constraints has gotten increasing attention in the machine learning community thanks to its wide range of applications such as algorithmic fairness and class-imbalanced classification. However, several recent works addressing non-convex constraints have only focused on simple models such as logistic regression or support vector machines. Neural networks, one of the most popular models for classification nowadays, are precluded and lack theoretical guarantees. In this work, we show that overparameterized neural networks could achieve a near-optimal and nea…
Neural Processing Research Center, Seoul National University(首尔大学神经处理研究中心)
Continual learning from a sequential stream of data is a crucial challenge for machine learning research. Most studies have been conducted on this topic under the single-label classification setting along with an assumption of balanced label distribution. This work expands this research horizon towards multi-label classification. In doing so, we identify unanticipated adversity innately existent in many multi-label datasets, the long-tailed distribution. We jointly address the two independently solved problems, Catastropic Forgetting and the long-tailed label distribution by first empirically …
University of British Columbia(不列颠哥伦比亚大学);University of California, Santa Barbara(加州大学圣巴巴拉分校)
Various logit-adjusted parameterizations of the cross-entropy (CE) loss have been proposed as alternatives to weighted CE for training large models on label-imbalanced data far beyond the zero train error regime. The driving force behind those designs has been the theory of implicit bias, which for linear(ized) models, explains why they successfully induce bias on the optimization path towards solutions that favor minorities. Aiming to extend this theory to non-linear models, we investigate the implicit geometry of classifiers and embeddings that are learned by different CE parameterizations. …
Medical image classification is often challenging for two reasons: a lack of labelled examples due to expensive and time-consuming annotation protocols, and imbalanced class labels due to the relative scarcity of disease-positive individuals in the wider population. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods exist for dealing with a lack of labels, but they generally do not address the problem of class imbalance. In this study we propose Adaptive Blended Consistency Loss (ABCL), a drop-in replacement for consistency loss in perturbation-based SSL methods. ABCL counteracts data skew by adaptively m…
Multi-Label Adaptive Batch Selection by Highlighting Hard and Imbalanced Samples
Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and Visual Computing, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications(重庆邮电大学数据工程与视觉计算重点实验室);School of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki(塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学信息学院)
Automated Machine Learning has grown very successful in automating the time-consuming, iterative tasks of machine learning model development. However, current methods struggle when the data is imbalanced. Since many real-world datasets are naturally imbalanced, and improper handling of this issue can lead to quite useless models, this issue should be handled carefully. This paper first introduces a new benchmark to study how different AutoML methods are affected by label imbalance. Second, we propose strategies to better deal with imbalance and integrate them into an existing AutoML framework.…
Automatic analysis of the video is one of most complex problems in the fields of computer vision and machine learning. A significant part of this research deals with (human) activity recognition (HAR) since humans, and the activities that they perform, generate most of the video semantics. Video-based HAR has applications in various domains, but one of the most important and challenging is HAR in sports videos. Some of the major issues include high inter- and intra-class variations, large class imbalance, the presence of both group actions and single player actions, and recognizing simultaneou…
University College London(伦敦大学学院);University of Birmingham(伯明翰大学);University of Cambridge(剑桥大学);University of Córdoba(科尔多瓦大学)
Data augmentation is rapidly gaining attention in machine learning. Synthetic data can be generated by simple transformations or through the data distribution. In the latter case, the main challenge is to estimate the label associated to new synthetic patterns. This paper studies the effect of generating synthetic data by convex combination of patterns and the use of these as unsupervised information in a semi-supervised learning framework with support vector machines, avoiding thus the need to label synthetic examples. We perform experiments on a total of 53 binary classification datasets. Ou…
Imbalanced dataset is occurred due to uneven distribution of data available in the real world such as disposition of complaints on government offices in Bandung. Consequently, multi-label text categorization algorithms may not produce the best performance because classifiers tend to be weighed down by the majority of the data and ignore the minority. In this paper, Bagging and Adaptive Boosting algorithms are employed to handle the issue and improve the performance of text categorization. The result is evaluated with four evaluation metrics such as hamming loss, subset accuracy, example-based …
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics(南京航空航天大学);Nanjing University(南京大学)
Traditional supervised learning requires ground truth labels for the training data, whose collection can be difficult in many cases. Recently, crowdsourcing has established itself as an efficient labeling solution through resorting to non-expert crowds. To reduce the labeling error effects, one common practice is to distribute each instance to multiple workers, whereas each worker only annotates a subset of data, resulting in the {\it sparse annotation} phenomenon. In this paper, we note that when meeting with class-imbalance, i.e., when the ground truth labels are {\it class-imbalanced}, the …
We propose a highly data-efficient active learning framework for image classification. Our novel framework combines: (1) unsupervised representation learning of a Convolutional Neural Network and (2) the Gaussian Process (GP) method, in sequence to achieve highly data and label efficient classifications. Moreover, both elements are less sensitive to the prevalent and challenging class imbalance issue, thanks to the (1) feature learned without labels and (2) the Bayesian nature of GP. The GP-provided uncertainty estimates enable active learning by ranking samples based on the uncertainty and se…
University of Granada(格拉纳达大学);University of Jaén(哈恩大学);King Abdulaziz University(阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王大学)
The learning from imbalanced data is a deeply studied problem in standard classification and, in recent times, also in multilabel classification. A handful of multilabel resampling methods have been proposed in late years, aiming to balance the labels distribution. However these methods have to face a new obstacle, specific for multilabel data, as is the joint appearance of minority and majority labels in the same data patterns. We proposed recently a new algorithm designed to decouple imbalanced labels concurring in the same instance, called REMEDIAL (\textit{REsampling MultilabEl datasets by…