VL-LTR: Learning Class-wise Visual-Linguistic Representation for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition

Recently, computer vision foundation models such as CLIP and ALI-GN, have shown impressive generalization capabilities on various downstream tasks. But their abilities to deal with the long-tailed data still remain to be proved. In this work, we present a novel framework based on pre-trained visual-linguistic models for long-tailed recognition (LTR), termed VL-LTR, and conduct empirical studies on the benefits of introducing text modality for long-tailed recognition tasks. Compared to existing approaches, the proposed VL-LTR has the following merits. (1) Our method can not only learn visual representation from images but also learn corresponding linguistic representation from noisy class-level text descriptions collected from the Internet; (2) Our method can effectively use the learned visual-linguistic representation to improve the visual recognition performance, especially for classes with fewer image samples. We also conduct extensive experiments and set the new state-of-the-art performance on widely-used LTR benchmarks. Notably, our method achieves 77.2% overall accuracy on ImageNet-LT, which significantly outperforms the previous best method by over 17 points, and is close to the prevailing performance training on the full ImageNet. Code is available at https://github.com/ChangyaoTian/VL-LTR.