HAR: Hardness Aware Reweighting for Imbalanced Datasets

Rahul Duggal, Scott Freitas, Sunny Dhamnani, Duen Horng Chau, Jimeng Sun

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Class imbalance is a significant i ssue t hat causes neural networks to underfit t o t he r are c lasses. Traditional mitigation strategies include loss reshaping and data resampling which amount to increasing the loss contribution of minority classes and decreasing the loss contributed by the majority ones. However, by treating each example within a class equally, these methods lead to undesirable scenarios where hard-to-classify examples from the majority classes are down-weighted and easy-to-classify examples from the minority classes are up-weighted. We propose the Hardness Aware Reweighting (HAR) framework, which circumvents this issue by increasing the loss contribution of hard examples from both the majority and minority classes. This is achieved by augmenting a neural network with intermediate classifier b ranches t o e nable e arly-exiting d uring t raining. Experimental results on large-scale datasets demonstrate that HAR consistently improves state-of-the-art accuracy while saving up to 20% of inference FLOPS.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2021
EditorsYixin Chen, Heiko Ludwig, Yicheng Tu, Usama Fayyad, Xingquan Zhu, Xiaohua Tony Hu, Suren Byna, Xiong Liu, Jianping Zhang, Shirui Pan, Vagelis Papalexakis, Jianwu Wang, Alfredo Cuzzocrea, Carlos Ordonez
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages735-745
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781665439022
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Event2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: Dec 15 2021Dec 18 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2021

Conference

Conference2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2021
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period12/15/2112/18/21

Keywords

  • Class imbalance
  • hardness
  • neural networks
  • reweighting

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Information Systems and Management
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Information Systems

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