Heavy-Tailed Class-Conditional Priors for Long-Tailed Generative Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bouayed, Aymene Mohammed, Deslauriers-Gauthier, Samuel, Iaccovelli, Adrian, Naccache, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Bouayed, Aymene Mohammed
Deslauriers-Gauthier, Samuel
Iaccovelli, Adrian
Naccache, David
author_facet Bouayed, Aymene Mohammed
Deslauriers-Gauthier, Samuel
Iaccovelli, Adrian
Naccache, David
contents Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) with global priors trained under an imbalanced empirical class distribution can lead to underrepresentation of tail classes in the latent space. While $t^3$VAE improves robustness via heavy-tailed Student's $t$-distribution priors, its single global prior still allocates mass proportionally to class frequency. We address this latent geometric bias by introducing C-$t^3$VAE, which assigns a per-class Student's $t$ joint prior over latent and output variables. This design promotes uniform prior mass across class-conditioned components. To optimize our model we derive a closed-form objective from the $γ$-power divergence, and we introduce an equal-weight latent mixture for class-balanced generation. On SVHN-LT, CIFAR100-LT, and CelebA datasets, C-$t^3$VAE consistently attains lower FID scores than $t^3$VAE and Gaussian-based VAE baselines under severe class imbalance while remaining competitive in balanced or mildly imbalanced settings. In per-class F1 evaluations, our model outperforms the conditional Gaussian VAE across highly imbalanced settings. Moreover, we identify the mild imbalance threshold $ρ< 5$, for which Gaussian-based models remain competitive. However, for $ρ\geq 5$ our approach yields improved class-balanced generation and mode coverage.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_02154
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Heavy-Tailed Class-Conditional Priors for Long-Tailed Generative Modeling
Bouayed, Aymene Mohammed
Deslauriers-Gauthier, Samuel
Iaccovelli, Adrian
Naccache, David
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) with global priors trained under an imbalanced empirical class distribution can lead to underrepresentation of tail classes in the latent space. While $t^3$VAE improves robustness via heavy-tailed Student's $t$-distribution priors, its single global prior still allocates mass proportionally to class frequency. We address this latent geometric bias by introducing C-$t^3$VAE, which assigns a per-class Student's $t$ joint prior over latent and output variables. This design promotes uniform prior mass across class-conditioned components. To optimize our model we derive a closed-form objective from the $γ$-power divergence, and we introduce an equal-weight latent mixture for class-balanced generation. On SVHN-LT, CIFAR100-LT, and CelebA datasets, C-$t^3$VAE consistently attains lower FID scores than $t^3$VAE and Gaussian-based VAE baselines under severe class imbalance while remaining competitive in balanced or mildly imbalanced settings. In per-class F1 evaluations, our model outperforms the conditional Gaussian VAE across highly imbalanced settings. Moreover, we identify the mild imbalance threshold $ρ< 5$, for which Gaussian-based models remain competitive. However, for $ρ\geq 5$ our approach yields improved class-balanced generation and mode coverage.
title Heavy-Tailed Class-Conditional Priors for Long-Tailed Generative Modeling
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02154