Modern image classifiers perform well on populated classes, while degrading considerably on tail classes with only a few instances. Humans, by contrast, effortlessly handle the long-tailed recognition challenge, since they can learn the tail representation based on different levels of semantic abstraction, making the learned tail features more discriminative. This phenomenon motivated us to propose SuperDisco, an algorithm that discovers super-class representations for long-tailed recognition using a graph model. We learn to construct the super-class graph to guide the representation learning to deal with long-tailed distributions. Through message passing on the super-class graph, image representations are rectified and refined by attending to the most relevant entities based on the semantic similarity among their super-classes. Moreover, we propose to meta-learn the super-class graph under the supervision of a prototype graph constructed from a small amount of imbalanced data. By doing so, we obtain a more robust super-class graph that further improves the long-tailed recognition performance. The consistent state-of-the-art experiments on the long-tailed CIFAR-100, ImageNet, Places and iNaturalist demonstrate the benefit of the discovered super-class graph for dealing with long-tailed distributions.

本文提出了SuperDisco算法，通过图模型发现超类表示，应用元学习方法元学习超类图来得到更稳健的超类图，对于处理长尾分布问题能够有显著提升，实验结果表明该算法在长尾CIFAR-100，ImageNet、Places和iNaturalist数据集上均取得最新的最优结果。

SuperDisco: 超级类别发现改善长尾数据的视觉识别