Learning to Re-weight Examples with Optimal Transport for Imbalanced Classification

Imbalanced data pose challenges for deep learning based classification models. One of the most widely-used approaches for tackling imbalanced data is re-weighting, where training samples are associated with different weights in the loss function. Most of existing re-weighting approaches treat the example weights as the learnable parameter and optimize the weights on the meta set, entailing expensive bilevel optimization. In this paper, we propose a novel re-weighting method based on optimal transport (OT) from a distributional point of view. Specifically, we view the training set as an imbalanced distribution over its samples, which is transported by OT to a balanced distribution obtained from the meta set.