Enhancing Mixture of Experts with Independent and Collaborative Learning for Long-Tail Visual Recognition

Deep neural networks (DNNs) face substantial challenges in Long-Tail Visual Recognition (LTVR) due to the inherent class imbalances in real-world data distributions. The Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework has emerged as a promising approach to addressing these issues. However, in MoE systems, experts are typically trained to optimize a collective objective, often neglecting the individual optimality of each expert. This individual optimality usually contributes to the overall performance, as the goals of different experts are not mutually exclusive. We propose the Independent and Collaborative Learning (ICL) framework to optimize each expert independently while ensuring global optimality. First, Diverse Optimization Learning (DOL) is introduced to enhance expert diversity and individual performance. Then, we conceptualize experts as parallel circuit branches and introduce Competition and Collaboration Learning (CoL). Competition Learning amplifies the gradients of better-performing experts to preserve individual optimality, and Collaboration Learning encourages collaboration through mutual distillation to enhance optimal knowledge sharing. ICL achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in experiments on CIFAR-100/10-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist 2018, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/PolarisLight/ICL.