VICAL: Vicinal Consistency Alignment for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition

arXiv:2609.04948v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-expert models have become the dominant paradigm for long-tailed learning, largely attributed to their presumed ability to benefit from expert diversity. However, we revisit this central assumption and reveal that diversity induced by logit adjustment or explicit regularizers does not guarantee better ensemble accuracy. Our work suggests that multi-expert models benefit more from variance reduction than diversity maximization. We introduce \textbf{VICAL}, a \textbf{VI}cinal \textbf{C}onsistency \textbf{AL}ignment framework that improves long-tailed recognition not by enforcing expert diversity, but by reducing prediction variance. Specifically, our approach comprises two key components: Self-Consistency Learning and Deep Ensemble Distillation. Self-Consistency Learning discourages reliance on unstable high-frequency information, smoothing the local loss landscape and mitigating overfitting, especially for tail classes. Deep Ensemble Distillation promotes cross-expert low-frequency semantic agreement using a low-resolution view, thereby sidestepping optimization conflicts with established knowledge. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist 2018 show that VICAL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of our consistency-driven design. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/FlamieZhu/Vicinal-Consistency-Alignment}{VICAL}.

Abstract:Multi-expert models have become the dominant paradigm for long-tailed learning, largely attributed to their presumed ability to benefit from expert diversity. However, we revisit this central assumption and reveal that diversity induced by logit adjustment or explicit regularizers does not guarantee better ensemble accuracy. Our work suggests that multi-expert models benefit more from variance reduction than diversity maximization. We introduce \textbf{VICAL}, a \textbf{VI}cinal \textbf{C}onsistency \textbf{AL}ignment framework that improves long-tailed recognition not by enforcing expert diversity, but by reducing prediction variance. Specifically, our approach comprises two key components: Self-Consistency Learning and Deep Ensemble Distillation. Self-Consistency Learning discourages reliance on unstable high-frequency information, smoothing the local loss landscape and mitigating overfitting, especially for tail classes. Deep Ensemble Distillation promotes cross-expert low-frequency semantic agreement using a low-resolution view, thereby sidestepping optimization conflicts with established knowledge. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist 2018 show that VICAL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of our consistency-driven design. Our code is available at \href{this https URL}{VICAL}.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.04948 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2609.04948v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.04948 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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VICAL: Vicinal Consistency Alignment for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition

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