ULFine: Unbiased Lightweight Fine-tuning for Foundation-Model-Assisted Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Enhao, Li, Chaohua, Geng, Chuanxing, Chen, Songcan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Enhao
Li, Chaohua
Geng, Chuanxing
Chen, Songcan
author_facet Zhang, Enhao
Li, Chaohua
Geng, Chuanxing
Chen, Songcan
contents Based on the success of large-scale visual foundation models like CLIP in various downstream tasks, this paper initially attempts to explore their impact on Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning (LTSSL) by employing the foundation model with three strategies: Linear Probing (LP), Lightweight Fine-Tuning (LFT), and Full Fine-Tuning (FFT). Our analysis presents the following insights: i) Compared to LTSSL algorithms trained from scratch, FFT results in a decline in model performance, whereas LP and LFT, although boosting overall model performance, exhibit negligible benefits to tail classes. ii) LP produces numerous false pseudo-labels due to \textit{underlearned} training data, while LFT can reduce the number of these false labels but becomes overconfident about them owing to \textit{biased fitting} training data. This exacerbates the pseudo-labeled and classifier biases inherent in LTSSL, limiting performance improvement in the tail classes. With these insights, we propose a Unbiased Lightweight Fine-tuning strategy, \textbf{ULFine}, which mitigates the overconfidence via confidence-aware adaptive fitting of textual prototypes and counteracts the pseudo-labeled and classifier biases via complementary fusion of dual logits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ULFine markedly decreases training costs by over ten times and substantially increases prediction accuracies compared to state-of-the-art methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_05062
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ULFine: Unbiased Lightweight Fine-tuning for Foundation-Model-Assisted Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning
Zhang, Enhao
Li, Chaohua
Geng, Chuanxing
Chen, Songcan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Based on the success of large-scale visual foundation models like CLIP in various downstream tasks, this paper initially attempts to explore their impact on Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning (LTSSL) by employing the foundation model with three strategies: Linear Probing (LP), Lightweight Fine-Tuning (LFT), and Full Fine-Tuning (FFT). Our analysis presents the following insights: i) Compared to LTSSL algorithms trained from scratch, FFT results in a decline in model performance, whereas LP and LFT, although boosting overall model performance, exhibit negligible benefits to tail classes. ii) LP produces numerous false pseudo-labels due to \textit{underlearned} training data, while LFT can reduce the number of these false labels but becomes overconfident about them owing to \textit{biased fitting} training data. This exacerbates the pseudo-labeled and classifier biases inherent in LTSSL, limiting performance improvement in the tail classes. With these insights, we propose a Unbiased Lightweight Fine-tuning strategy, \textbf{ULFine}, which mitigates the overconfidence via confidence-aware adaptive fitting of textual prototypes and counteracts the pseudo-labeled and classifier biases via complementary fusion of dual logits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ULFine markedly decreases training costs by over ten times and substantially increases prediction accuracies compared to state-of-the-art methods.
title ULFine: Unbiased Lightweight Fine-tuning for Foundation-Model-Assisted Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05062