FCC: Feature Clusters Compression for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are rather restrictive in long-tailed data, since they commonly exhibit an under-representation for minority classes. Various remedies have been proposed to tackle this problem from different perspectives, but they ignore the impact of the density of Backbone Features (BFs) on this issue. Through representation learning, DNNs can map BFs into dense clusters in feature space, while the features of minority classes often show sparse clusters. In practical applications, these features are discretely mapped or even cross the decision boundary resulting in misclassification. Inspired by this observation, we propose a simple and generic method, namely Feature Clusters Compression (FCC), to increase the density of BFs by compressing backbone feature clusters. The proposed FCC can be easily achieved by only multiplying original BFs by a scaling factor in training phase, which establishes a linear compression relationship between the original and multiplied features, and forces DNNs to map the former into denser clusters. In test phase, we directly feed original features without multiplying the factor to the classifier, such that BFs of test samples are mapped closer together and do not easily cross the decision boundary. Meanwhile, FCC can be friendly combined with existing long-tailed methods and further boost them. We apply FCC to numerous state-of-the-art methods and evaluate them on widely used long-tailed benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments fully verify the effectiveness and generality of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/lijian16/FCC.