Long-tailed Object Detection Pretraining: Dynamic Rebalancing Contrastive Learning with Dual Reconstruction

CL Duan, Y Li, XS Wei, L Zhao - Advances in Neural …, 2025 - proceedings.neurips.cc
CL Duan, Y Li, XS Wei, L Zhao
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025proceedings.neurips.cc
Pre-training plays a vital role in various vision tasks, such as object recognition and
detection. Commonly used pre-training methods, which typically rely on randomized
approaches like uniform or Gaussian distributions to initialize model parameters, often fall
short when confronted with long-tailed distributions, especially in detection tasks. This is
largely due to extreme data imbalance and the issue of simplicity bias. In this paper, we
introduce a novel pre-training framework for object detection, called Dynamic Rebalancing …
Abstract
Pre-training plays a vital role in various vision tasks, such as object recognition and detection. Commonly used pre-training methods, which typically rely on randomized approaches like uniform or Gaussian distributions to initialize model parameters, often fall short when confronted with long-tailed distributions, especially in detection tasks. This is largely due to extreme data imbalance and the issue of simplicity bias. In this paper, we introduce a novel pre-training framework for object detection, called Dynamic Rebalancing Contrastive Learning with Dual Reconstruction (2DRCL). Our method builds on a Holistic-Local Contrastive Learning mechanism, which aligns pre-training with object detection by capturing both global contextual semantics and detailed local patterns. To tackle the imbalance inherent in long-tailed data, we design a dynamic rebalancing strategy that adjusts the sampling of underrepresented instances throughout the pre-training process, ensuring better representation of tail classes. Moreover, Dual Reconstruction addresses simplicity bias by enforcing a reconstruction task aligned with the self-consistency principle, specifically benefiting underrepresented tail classes. Experiments on COCO and LVIS v1. 0 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, particularly in improving the mAP/AP scores for tail classes.
proceedings.neurips.cc