Imbalanced Label Distribution Learning

Abstract

Label distribution covers a certain number of labels, representing the degree to which each label describes an instance. The learning process on the instances labeled by label distributions is called Label Distribution Learning (LDL). Although LDL has been applied successfully to many practical applications, one problem with existing LDL methods is that they are limited to data with balanced label information. However, annotation information in real-world data often exhibits imbalanced distributions, which significantly degrades the performance of existing methods. In this paper, we investigate the Imbalanced Label Distribution Learning (ILDL) problem. To handle this challenging problem, we delve into the characteristics of ILDL and empirically find that the representation distribution shift is the underlying reason for the performance degradation of existing methods. Inspired by this finding, we present a novel method named Representation Distribution Alignment (RDA). RDA aligns the distributions of feature representations and label representations to alleviate the impact of the distribution gap between the training set and the test set caused by the imbalance issue. Extensive experiments verify the superior performance of RDA. Our work fills the gap in benchmarks and techniques for practical ILDL problems.