Deep Representation Learning on Long-Tailed Data: A Learnable Embedding Augmentation Perspective

This paper considers learning deep features from long-tailed data. We observe that in the deep feature space, the head classes and the tail classes present different distribution patterns. The head classes have a relatively large spatial span, while the tail classes have a significantly small spatial span, due to the lack of intra-class diversity. This uneven distribution between head and tail classes distorts the overall feature space, which compromises the discriminative ability of the learned features. In response, we seek to expand the distribution of the tail classes during training, so as to alleviate the distortion of the feature space. To this end, we propose to augment each instance of the tail classes with certain disturbances in the deep feature space. With the augmentation, a specified feature vector becomes a set of probable features scattered around itself, which is analogical to an atomic nucleus surrounded by the electron cloud. Intuitively, we name it as ``feature cloud''. The intra-class distribution of the feature cloud is learned from the head classes, and thus provides higher intra-class variation to the tail classes. Consequentially, it alleviates the distortion of the learned feature space, and improves deep representation learning on long tailed data. Extensive experimental evaluations on person re-identification and face recognition tasks confirm the effectiveness of our method.