Density-Ratio Rescoring for Imbalanced Classification
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
Density‑Ratio Rescoring (DRR) enhances a classifier trained with the original class prior by adding a survey‑raking dual score that reweights the majority class to match minority feature moments within a tolerance. The method standardizes both the dual and base scores, combines them with equal weight, and uses the fitted dual directly for prediction without resampling or refitting the base model. Experiments on 24 tabular benchmarks and a gene‑expression cohort show that DRR improves average precision over the standardized base on every dataset, with a mean gain of 0.034, and outperforms a shared‑dual raking‑and‑relabeling resampler on most datasets.
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.
The paper introduces a controlled evaluation framework to determine when encoder adaptation is beneficial after correcting for class imbalance in long‑tailed recognition tasks. By separating unique support from representation allocation and comparing classifier‑only versus full‑network continuations, the study shows that encoder updates become worthwhile only when representation allocation is highly imbalanced, a transition that persists across various corrections and scales to ImageNet. The framework uses stage‑specific controls, multiple objectives, whole‑distribution metrics, and hierarchical inference to robustly estimate incremental encoder value.
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.
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.
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.