Real-world tasks are universally associated with training samples that exhibit a long-tailed class distribution, and traditional deep learning models are not suitable for fitting this distribution, thus resulting in a biased trained model. To surmount this dilemma, massive deep long-tailed learning studies have been proposed to achieve inter-class fairness models by designing sophisticated sampling strategies or improving existing model structures and loss functions. Habitually, these studies tend to apply data augmentation strategies to improve the generalization performance of their models. However, this augmentation strategy applied to balanced distributions may not be the best option for long-tailed distributions. For a profound understanding of data augmentation, we first theoretically analyze the gains of traditional augmentation strategies in long-tailed learning, and observe that augmentation methods cause the long-tailed distribution to be imbalanced again, resulting in an intertwined imbalance: inherent data-wise imbalance and extrinsic augmentation-wise imbalance, i.e., two 'birds' co-exist in long-tailed learning. Motivated by this observation, we propose an adaptive Dynamic Optional Data Augmentation (DODA) to address this intertwined imbalance, i.e., one 'stone' simultaneously 'kills' two 'birds', which allows each class to choose appropriate augmentation methods by maintaining a corresponding augmentation probability distribution for each class during training. Extensive experiments across mainstream long-tailed recognition benchmarks (e.g., CIFAR-100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist 2018) prove the effectiveness and flexibility of the DODA in overcoming the intertwined imbalance.

Real-world data generally follows a long-tailed distribution, which makes traditional high-performance training strategies unable to show their usual effects. Various insights have been proposed to alleviate this challenging distribution. However, some observations indicate that models trained on long-tailed distributions always show a trade-off between the performance of head and tail classes. For a profound understanding of the trade-off, we first theoretically analyze the trade-off problem in long-tailed learning and creatively transform the trade-off problem in long-tailed learning into a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem. Motivated by these analyses, we propose the idea of strategy fusion for MOO long-tailed learning and point out the potential conflict problem. We further design a Multi-Objective Optimization based Strategy Fusion (MOOSF), which effectively resolves conflicts, and achieves an efficient fusion of heterogeneous strategies. Comprehensive experiments on mainstream datasets show that even the simplest strategy fusion can outperform complex long-tailed strategies. More importantly, it provides a new perspective for generalized long-tailed learning. The code is available in the accompanying supplementary materials.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can learn representative graph-level features to achieve efficient graph classification. But GNNs usually assume an environment where both class and structure distribution are balanced. Although previous works have considered the graph classification problem under the scenario of class imbalance or structure imbalance, they habitually ignored the obvious fact that class imbalance and structural imbalance are often intertwined in the real world. In this paper, we propose a carefully designed structure-driven learning framework called ImbGNN to address the potential intertwined class imbalance and structural imbalance in graph classification. Specifically, we find that feature-oriented augmentation (e.g., feature masking) and structure-oriented augmentation (e.g., edge perturbation) will have differential impacts when applied to different graphs. Therefore, we design optional augmentation based on the average degree distribution to alleviate structural imbalance. Furthermore, based on the imbalance of graph size distribution, we utilize a similarity-friendly graph random walk to extract a core subgraph to improve the accuracy of graph kernel similarity calculation, and then construct a more reasonable kernel-based graph of graphs, thereby alleviating the class imbalance and size imbalance. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed ImbGNN framework outperforms previous baselines on imbalanced graph classification tasks. The code of ImbGNN is available in~https://github.com/Xiaovy/ImbGNN.