Scientific discovery across diverse fields increasingly grapples with datasets exhibiting pathological long-tailed distributions: a few common phenomena overshadow a multitude of rare yet scientifically critical instances. Unlike standard benchmarks, these scientific datasets often feature extreme imbalance coupled with a modest number of classes and limited overall sample volume, rendering existing long-tailed recognition (LTR) techniques ineffective. Such methods, biased by majority classes or prone to overfitting on scarce tail data, frequently fail to identify the very instances--novel materials, rare disease biomarkers, faint astronomical signals--that drive scientific breakthroughs. This paper introduces a novel, end-to-end framework explicitly designed to address pathological long-tailed recognition in scientific contexts. Our approach synergizes a Balanced Supervised Contrastive Learning (BSCL) mechanism, which enhances the representation of tail classes by dynamically re-weighting their contributions, with a Smooth Objective Regularization (SOR) strategy that manages the inherent tension between tail-class focus and overall classification performance. We introduce and analyze the real-world ZincFluor chemical dataset (T = 137.54)

As datasets continue to expand in size and complexity, these models have become increasingly sophisticated, with deeper architectures and greater expressive power. Despite these advances, DNNs trained on imbalanced class distributions often exhibit a tendency to favor majority classes, leading to degraded performance on underrepresented classes [18, 39, 27, 17]. Because many real-world datasets follow long-tailed distributions in which minority classes can contain critical and informative patterns, developing methods that enable DNNs to learn effectively from imbalanced data is essential to prevent the loss of valuable information from these rare classes [26, 34, 16]. Moreover, data encountered in real-world applications are frequently multi-modal, meaning that observations originate from heterogeneous sources [6, 29, 7, 35]. To make effective use of such heterogeneous inputs, a wide range of multi-modal learning approaches have been proposed that exploit complementary information across modalities to enhance predictive performance [10, 5]. Common strategies integrate multiple modalities into a unified representation, using techniques that span from straightforward feature-level concatenation [19, 11, 12] to more sophisticated neural architectures that learn joint representations in an end-to-end manner [20, 32]. Although prior research has extensively studied class imbalance and multi-modal data separately, relatively little attentionhas beengiven to settings where bothchallenges arise si2 multaneously. Developing methods that can effectively handle long-tailed class distributions in conjunction with multi-modal inputs is therefore essential in many real-world applications. In the medical domain, for instance, datasets often contain far more samples from healthy individuals than from patients with specific conditions, while also encompassing diverse datatypes such asimagingdata(e.g., X-rays)alongsideauxiliary informationincluding demographics and clinical histories.

Existing long-tailed recognition methods, aiming totrain class-balanced models from long-tailed data, generally assume the models would be evaluated on the uniform test class distribution.

We show results on CIFAR-100 LT with an imbalance factor (β)of100and200.

The main observation behind our approach is that separation does not require optimization butcan besolvedinclosed-form prior totraining and plugged into a network.

We generate a set of diverse expert models via hypernetworks to cover all possible distribution scenarios, and optimize the model ensemble to adapt to any test distribution. Crucially, in any distribution scenario, we can flexibly output a dedicated model solution that matches the user's preference.