arXiv Machine Learning

Bias-Corrected Data Synthesis for Imbalanced Learning

The paper introduces a bias‑correction method for synthetic oversampling in imbalanced learning. It estimates the loss discrepancy caused by the data generator using a held‑out majority subset and transfers this correction to the minority class under a uniform bias‑transfer assumption. The authors provide finite‑sample bounds for bias transfer and excess balanced risk, identify when SMOTE introduces significant bias, and demonstrate the method’s applicability to multi‑task learning and propensity‑score estimation, with empirical results showing greatest benefit when synthetic distortion is large.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24

When Does Synthetic Data Augmentation Improve Score-Based Imbalanced Classification?

Synthetic data augmentation is widely used to mitigate class imbalance, but its theoretical effects on score-based classification remain poorly understood. This paper develops a framework for characterizing when synthetic minority augmentation can improve threshold-integrated and threshold-optimized metrics, including AUROC, AUPRC, best-threshold balanced accuracy, and best-threshold \(\F_1\) score.

arXiv AI
Jul 24

Synthetic minority data is redundant or invalid: a data-dependent validity theory and a de-biased test

arXiv:2607. 20787v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For two decades, the standard remedy for class-imbalanced learning has been to fabricate synthetic minority examples, and the standard evidence of their validity has been a check that cannot fail: synthetic points are scored against the very data that generated them.

By Ahmad B. Hassanat, Ahmad S. Tarawneh, Ghada A. Altarawneh
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

SAGE: Subpopulation-Aware Generative Enhancement for Mitigating Spurious Correlations

SAGE (Subpopulation-Aware Generative Enhancement) is a two-stage generative augmentation framework designed to mitigate spurious correlations in machine learning when group labels are unavailable. It uses cluster-derived sub-labels and class labels to fine‑tune a conditional generative model and text encoder, producing synthetic data that fills underrepresented regions and creates a balanced validation set for last‑layer reweighting. Experiments show SAGE improves worst‑group accuracy to 89.5%, 85.7%, and 79.1% on Waterbirds, CelebA, and MetaShift, outperforming existing group‑label‑free baselines by up to 7.7 percentage points.

By Yiming Luo, Rongqiang Zhao, Jie Liu
arXiv AI
Jul 21

Data Balancing Strategies: A Systematic Survey of Resampling and Augmentation Methods

arXiv:2505. 13518v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Imbalanced datasets, where one class significantly outnumbers others, remain a persistent challenge in machine learning, often biasing predictions toward the majority class and degrading classifier performance.

By Behnam Yousefimehr, Mehdi Ghatee, Javad Fazli, Shervin Ghaffari, Zahra Rafei, Mohammad Amin Seifi, Sajed Tavakoli, Abolfazl Nikahd, Mahdi Razi Gandomani, Alireza Orouji, Ramtin Mahmoudi Kashani, Sarina Heshmati, Negin Sadat Mousavi
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Collaborative Optimization of Multiclass Imbalanced Learning: Density-Aware and Region-Guided Boosting

The paper introduces a collaborative optimization Boosting model for multiclass imbalanced learning that integrates density and confidence factors to create a noise‑resistant weight update mechanism and a dynamic sampling strategy. The modules are tightly coupled to coordinate weight updates, sample region partitioning, and region‑guided sampling. Experiments on 40 public imbalanced datasets show the model significantly outperforms seven state‑of‑the‑art baselines.

By Chuantao Li, Zhi Li, Jiahao Xu, Jie Li, Sheng Li
arXiv AI
2d ago

When majority rules, minority loses: bias amplification of gradient descent

The paper presents a formal framework for majority‑minority learning tasks, demonstrating that standard gradient‑descent training can amplify bias by favoring majority groups and producing stereotypical predictors that ignore minority‑specific features. It identifies three key theoretical findings: the close proximity between full‑data and stereotypical predictors, the dominance of a region where training the entire model mainly captures majority traits, and a lower bound on the extra training needed to mitigate this effect. Experiments on deep learning for tabular and image classification illustrate these results.

By Fran\c{c}ois Bachoc (LPP), J\'er\^ome Bolte (TSE-R), Ryan Boustany (TSE-R), Jean-Michel Loubes (IMT, REGALIA)