arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

Shortcut-Resistant CAM Distillation for Long-Tailed Recognition

The paper introduces Shortcut-Resistant CAM Distillation (SRCD), a plug‑and‑play framework that mitigates shortcut learning in long‑tailed recognition tasks. SRCD transfers object‑focused explanations from head classes to tail classes by aggregating Class Activation Maps (CAMs) into a shortcut‑resistant teacher and distilling it to tail‑class CAMs. The authors provide a theoretical analysis of shortcut reliance in CAM space and demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines on long‑tailed benchmarks.

By Wenhai Wan, Teng Zhang, Shao-Yuan Li, Xinrui Wang, Qiang-Sheng Hua, Songcan Chen