Focal-SAM: Focal Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Long-Tailed Classification

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Li, Sicong, Xu, Qianqian, Yang, Zhiyong, Wang, Zitai, Zhang, Linchao, Cao, Xiaochun, Huang, Qingming
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866910981916983296
author Li, Sicong
Xu, Qianqian
Yang, Zhiyong
Wang, Zitai
Zhang, Linchao
Cao, Xiaochun
Huang, Qingming
author_facet Li, Sicong
Xu, Qianqian
Yang, Zhiyong
Wang, Zitai
Zhang, Linchao
Cao, Xiaochun
Huang, Qingming
contents Real-world datasets often follow a long-tailed distribution, making generalization to tail classes difficult. Recent methods resorted to long-tail variants of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), such as ImbSAM and CC-SAM, to improve generalization by flattening the loss landscape. However, these attempts face a trade-off between computational efficiency and control over the loss landscape. On the one hand, ImbSAM is efficient but offers only coarse control as it excludes head classes from the SAM process. On the other hand, CC-SAM provides fine-grained control through class-dependent perturbations but at the cost of efficiency due to multiple backpropagations. Seeing this dilemma, we introduce Focal-SAM, which assigns different penalties to class-wise sharpness, achieving fine-grained control without extra backpropagations, thus maintaining efficiency. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze Focal-SAM's generalization ability and derive a sharper generalization bound. Extensive experiments on both traditional and foundation models validate the effectiveness of Focal-SAM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_01660
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Focal-SAM: Focal Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Long-Tailed Classification
Li, Sicong
Xu, Qianqian
Yang, Zhiyong
Wang, Zitai
Zhang, Linchao
Cao, Xiaochun
Huang, Qingming
Machine Learning
Real-world datasets often follow a long-tailed distribution, making generalization to tail classes difficult. Recent methods resorted to long-tail variants of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), such as ImbSAM and CC-SAM, to improve generalization by flattening the loss landscape. However, these attempts face a trade-off between computational efficiency and control over the loss landscape. On the one hand, ImbSAM is efficient but offers only coarse control as it excludes head classes from the SAM process. On the other hand, CC-SAM provides fine-grained control through class-dependent perturbations but at the cost of efficiency due to multiple backpropagations. Seeing this dilemma, we introduce Focal-SAM, which assigns different penalties to class-wise sharpness, achieving fine-grained control without extra backpropagations, thus maintaining efficiency. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze Focal-SAM's generalization ability and derive a sharper generalization bound. Extensive experiments on both traditional and foundation models validate the effectiveness of Focal-SAM.
title Focal-SAM: Focal Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Long-Tailed Classification
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01660