minority class
PoGDiff: Product-of-Gaussians Diffusion Models for Imbalanced Text-to-Image Generation
Diffusion models have made significant advancements in recent years. However, their performance often deteriorates when trained or fine-tuned on imbalanced datasets. This degradation is largely due to the disproportionate representation of majority and minority data in image-text pairs. In this paper, we propose a general fine-tuning approach, dubbed PoGDiff, to address this challenge. Rather than directly minimizing the KL divergence between the predicted and ground-truth distributions, PoGDiff replaces the ground-truth distribution with a Product of Gaussians (PoG), which is constructed by combining the original ground-truth targets with the predicted distribution conditioned on a neighboring text embedding. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method effectively addresses the imbalance problem in diffusion models, improving both generation accuracy and quality.
Fourier Clouds: Fast Bias Correction for Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning
Pseudo-label-based Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) often suffers from classifier bias, particularly under class imbalance, as inaccurate pseudo-labels tend to exacerbate existing biases towards majority classes. Existing methods, such as CDMAD[30], utilize simplistic reference inputs--typically uniform or blank-colored images--to estimate and correct this bias. However, such simplistic references fundamentally ignore realistic statistical information inherent to real datasets, specifically typical color distributions, texture details, and frequency characteristics. This lack of statistical representativeness can lead the model to inaccurately estimate its inherent bias, limiting the effectiveness of bias correction, particularly under severe class imbalance or substantial distribution mismatches between labeled and unlabeled datasets. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the FARAD (Fourier-Adapted Reference for Accurate Debiasing) System.
Thumb on the Scale: Optimal Loss Weighting in Last Layer Retraining
While machine learning models become more capable in discriminative tasks at scale, their ability to overcome biases introduced by training data has come under increasing scrutiny. Previous results suggest that there are two extremes of parameterization with very different behaviors: the population (underparameterized) setting where loss weighting is optimal and the separable overparameterized setting where loss weighting is ineffective at ensuring equal performance across classes. This work explores the regime of last layer retraining (LLR) in which the unseen limited (retraining) data is frequently inseparable and the model proportionately sized, falling between the two aforementioned extremes. We show, in theory and practice, that loss weighting is still effective in this regime, but that these weights must take into account the relative overparameterization of the model.
Imbalanced Classification under Capacity Constraints
Fraiman, Daniel, Fraiman, Ricardo
In many classification settings, the class of primary interest is underrepresented, leading to imbalanced data problems that arise in applications such as rare disease detection and fraud identification. In these contexts, identifying a potential positive instance typically triggers costly follow-up actions, such as medical imaging or detailed transaction inspection, which are subject to limited operational capacity. Motivated by this setting, we consider classification problems where data may arrive sequentially and decisions must be made under constraints on the number of instances that can be selected for further analysis. We propose a classification framework that explicitly controls the rate of positive predictions, enforcing a user-defined bound on the proportion of observations classified as belonging to the minority class while maximizing detection performance. The approach can be implemented using standard learning methods and naturally extends to online settings, where decisions are taken in real time. We show that incorporating capacity constraints leads to substantial improvements over classical approaches, including resampling techniques such as SMOTE, which do not directly control the selection rate.
ABC: Auxiliary Balanced Classifier for Class-Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning
Existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms typically assume classbalanced datasets, although the class distributions of many real-world datasets are imbalanced. In general, classifiers trained on a class-imbalanced dataset are biased toward the majority classes. This issue becomes more problematic for SSL algorithms because they utilize the biased prediction of unlabeled data for training. However, traditional class-imbalanced learning techniques, which are designed for labeled data, cannot be readily combined with SSL algorithms. We propose a scalable class-imbalanced SSL algorithm that can effectively use unlabeled data, while mitigating class imbalance by introducing an auxiliary balanced classifier (ABC) of a single layer, which is attached to a representation layer of an existing SSL algorithm. The ABC is trained with a class-balanced loss of a minibatch, while using high-quality representations learned from all data points in the minibatch using the backbone SSL algorithm to avoid overfitting and information loss. Moreover, we use consistency regularization, a recent SSL technique for utilizing unlabeled data in a modified way, to train the ABC to be balanced among the classes by selecting unlabeled data with the same probability for each class. The proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance in various class-imbalanced SSL experiments using four benchmark datasets.