LCReg: Long-tailed image classification with Latent Categories based Recognition

In this work, we tackle the challenging problem of long-tailed image recognition. Previous long-tailed recognition approaches mainly focus on data augmentation or re-balancing strategies for the tail classes to give them more attention during model training. However, these methods are limited by the small number of training images for the tail classes, which results in poor feature representations. To address this issue, we propose the Latent Categories based long-tail Recognition (LCReg) method. Our hypothesis is that common latent features shared by head and tail classes can be used to improve feature representation. Specifically, we learn a set of class-agnostic latent features shared by both head and tail classes, and then use semantic data augmentation on the latent features to implicitly increase the diversity of the training sample. We conduct extensive experiments on five long-tailed image recognition datasets, and the results show that our proposed method significantly improves the baselines.