Large Language Models for Imbalanced Classification: Diversity makes the difference

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Nguyen, Dang, Gupta, Sunil, Do, Kien, Nguyen, Thin, Braund, Taylor, Whitton, Alexis, Venkatesh, Svetha
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866912642385313792
author Nguyen, Dang
Gupta, Sunil
Do, Kien
Nguyen, Thin
Braund, Taylor
Whitton, Alexis
Venkatesh, Svetha
author_facet Nguyen, Dang
Gupta, Sunil
Do, Kien
Nguyen, Thin
Braund, Taylor
Whitton, Alexis
Venkatesh, Svetha
contents Oversampling is one of the most widely used approaches for addressing imbalanced classification. The core idea is to generate additional minority samples to rebalance the dataset. Most existing methods, such as SMOTE, require converting categorical variables into numerical vectors, which often leads to information loss. Recently, large language model (LLM)-based methods have been introduced to overcome this limitation. However, current LLM-based approaches typically generate minority samples with limited diversity, reducing robustness and generalizability in downstream classification tasks. To address this gap, we propose a novel LLM-based oversampling method designed to enhance diversity. First, we introduce a sampling strategy that conditions synthetic sample generation on both minority labels and features. Second, we develop a new permutation strategy for fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs. Third, we fine-tune the LLM not only on minority samples but also on interpolated samples to further enrich variability. Extensive experiments on 10 tabular datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms eight SOTA baselines. The generated synthetic samples are both realistic and diverse. Moreover, we provide theoretical analysis through an entropy-based perspective, proving that our method encourages diversity in the generated samples.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_09783
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Large Language Models for Imbalanced Classification: Diversity makes the difference
Nguyen, Dang
Gupta, Sunil
Do, Kien
Nguyen, Thin
Braund, Taylor
Whitton, Alexis
Venkatesh, Svetha
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Oversampling is one of the most widely used approaches for addressing imbalanced classification. The core idea is to generate additional minority samples to rebalance the dataset. Most existing methods, such as SMOTE, require converting categorical variables into numerical vectors, which often leads to information loss. Recently, large language model (LLM)-based methods have been introduced to overcome this limitation. However, current LLM-based approaches typically generate minority samples with limited diversity, reducing robustness and generalizability in downstream classification tasks. To address this gap, we propose a novel LLM-based oversampling method designed to enhance diversity. First, we introduce a sampling strategy that conditions synthetic sample generation on both minority labels and features. Second, we develop a new permutation strategy for fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs. Third, we fine-tune the LLM not only on minority samples but also on interpolated samples to further enrich variability. Extensive experiments on 10 tabular datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms eight SOTA baselines. The generated synthetic samples are both realistic and diverse. Moreover, we provide theoretical analysis through an entropy-based perspective, proving that our method encourages diversity in the generated samples.
title Large Language Models for Imbalanced Classification: Diversity makes the difference
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09783