The paper benchmarks six long‑tail loss functions—cross‑entropy, weighted CE, class‑balanced loss, focal loss, LDAM, and logit‑adjusted softmax—across three single‑cell foundation model architectures (scGPT, scBERT, Geneformer) and three datasets (Multiple Sclerosis, Zheng68K, human Pancreas). It shows that overall accuracy masks systematic failures on rare, disease‑relevant cell types, with a consistent gap between overall accuracy, Macro‑F1, and rare‑class recall under plain cross‑entropy. The study identifies two distinct regimes of rare‑class failure, predicts reweighting efficacy by absolute training‑set size, and finds class‑balanced loss and LDAM to be the most reliable across all settings.
By Zeyu Dong, Jiahui Zhong
arXiv:2509. 07605v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class imbalance poses a significant challenge to supervised classification, particularly in critical domains like medical diagnostics and anomaly detection where minority class instances are rare.
By Ali Nawaz, Amir Ahmad, Shehroz S. Khan
arXiv:2604. 01506v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-tailed classification, where a small number of frequent classes dominate many rare ones, remains challenging because models systematically favor frequent classes at inference time.
By Zhanliang Wang, Hongzhuo Chen, Quan Minh Nguyen, Mian Umair Ahsan, Kai Wang
arXiv:2606. 29720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Resampling methods such as SMOTE and random under/over-sampling are standard tools for class-imbalanced classification, almost always evaluated by minority-class accuracy or F1.
By Zewen Liu
arXiv:2506. 01486v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data imbalance persists as a pervasive challenge in regression tasks, introducing bias in model performance and undermining predictive reliability.
By Jelke Wibbeke, Sebastian Rohjans, Andreas Rauh
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.
The paper demonstrates that common binary classification metrics—Matthews' correlation coefficient, Cohen's κ, the F-score, and the Jaccard similarity—are not robust to extreme class imbalance, as the Bayes classifier’s true positive rate tends to zero when the minority class proportion vanishes. To address this, the authors propose robustified versions of these metrics that include a tuning parameter, ensuring that the Bayes-optimal classifier’s threshold remains bounded and its true positive rate stays above zero even in highly imbalanced scenarios. The study provides theoretical bounds, simulation results, and practical guidance on applying these robust metrics to real data, such as a credit‑default dataset, and discusses their relationship to ROC and precision‑recall curves.
By Hajo Holzmann, Bernhard Klar
arXiv:2606. 10250v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Class imbalance is a common problem in deep learning that severely degrades performance.
By Haengbok Chung, Jae Sung Lee
arXiv:2606. 26053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic data augmentation is widely used to mitigate class imbalance, but its theoretical effects on score-based classification remain poorly understood.
By Zhengchi Ma, Pengfei Lyu, Anru R. Zhang
arXiv:2609.00093v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Imbalanced time series classification is often addressed by changing the training distribution, objective, logits, or final threshold. These interventi...
By Chuanhang Qiu, Yanran Xu, Yue Wang, Anthony Bagnall
arXiv:2607. 09832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-tailed recognition methods often modify losses, margins, or representations to reduce the dominance of frequent classes.
By Juan Terven, Diana Margarita C\'ordova Esparza, Julio Alejandro Romero Gonzalez, Edgar Arturo Ch\'avez Urbiola, Francisco Javier Willars Rodriguez, Juan Bautista Hurtado Ramos, Alfonso Ramirez Pedraza
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