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Main Authors: Lan, Yifan, Cai, Xin, Cheng, Jun, Tan, Shan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01804
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author Lan, Yifan
Cai, Xin
Cheng, Jun
Tan, Shan
author_facet Lan, Yifan
Cai, Xin
Cheng, Jun
Tan, Shan
contents Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved significant success in various applications with large-scale and balanced data. However, data in real-world visual recognition are usually long-tailed, bringing challenges to efficient training and deployment of DNNs. Information bottleneck (IB) is an elegant approach for representation learning. In this paper, we propose a balanced information bottleneck (BIB) approach, in which loss function re-balancing and self-distillation techniques are integrated into the original IB network. BIB is thus capable of learning a sufficient representation with essential label-related information fully preserved for long-tailed visual recognition. To further enhance the representation learning capability, we also propose a novel structure of mixture of multiple balanced information bottlenecks (MBIB), where different BIBs are responsible for combining knowledge from different network layers. MBIB facilitates an end-to-end learning strategy that trains representation and classification simultaneously from an information theory perspective. We conduct experiments on commonly used long-tailed datasets, including CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist 2018. Both BIB and MBIB reach state-of-the-art performance for long-tailed visual recognition.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_01804
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mixture of Balanced Information Bottlenecks for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition
Lan, Yifan
Cai, Xin
Cheng, Jun
Tan, Shan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Information Theory
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved significant success in various applications with large-scale and balanced data. However, data in real-world visual recognition are usually long-tailed, bringing challenges to efficient training and deployment of DNNs. Information bottleneck (IB) is an elegant approach for representation learning. In this paper, we propose a balanced information bottleneck (BIB) approach, in which loss function re-balancing and self-distillation techniques are integrated into the original IB network. BIB is thus capable of learning a sufficient representation with essential label-related information fully preserved for long-tailed visual recognition. To further enhance the representation learning capability, we also propose a novel structure of mixture of multiple balanced information bottlenecks (MBIB), where different BIBs are responsible for combining knowledge from different network layers. MBIB facilitates an end-to-end learning strategy that trains representation and classification simultaneously from an information theory perspective. We conduct experiments on commonly used long-tailed datasets, including CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist 2018. Both BIB and MBIB reach state-of-the-art performance for long-tailed visual recognition.
title Mixture of Balanced Information Bottlenecks for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01804