The Equalization Losses: Gradient-Driven Training for Long-tailed Object Recognition

Long-tail distribution is widely spread in real-world applications. Due to the extremely small ratio of instances, tail categories often show inferior accuracy. In this paper, we find such performance bottleneck is mainly caused by the imbalanced gradients, which can be categorized into two parts: (1) positive part, deriving from the samples of the same category, and (2) negative part, contributed by other categories. Based on comprehensive experiments, it is also observed that the gradient ratio of accumulated positives to negatives is a good indicator to measure how balanced a category is trained. Inspired by this, we come up with a gradient-driven training mechanism to tackle the long-tail problem: re-balancing the positive/negative gradients dynamically according to current accumulative gradients, with a unified goal of achieving balance gradient ratios. Taking advantage of the simple and flexible gradient mechanism, we introduce a new family of gradient-driven loss functions, namely equalization losses. We conduct extensive experiments on a wide spectrum of visual tasks, including two-stage/single-stage long-tailed object detection (LVIS), long-tailed image classification (ImageNet-LT, Places-LT, iNaturalist), and long-tailed semantic segmentation (ADE20 K). Our method consistently outperforms the baseline models, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed equalization losses.