Trust-calibrated Collaborative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition

Abstract

Real-world visual recognition faces the fundamental challenge of long-tailed distributions. While state-of-the-art methods often employ multi-expert models to address different frequency categories, we find that the mutual knowledge distillation used in these models enhances collaboration at the cost of introducing two critical limitations: indiscriminate knowledge transfer leads to bias propagation, where a single expert's error can spread and contaminate others, and error consolidation, where mutual reinforcement of incorrect predictions solidifies erroneous consensus. To overcome these issues, we propose Trust-calibrated Collaborative Learning (TCL). Our framework introduces the trustworthy knowledge orchestration module, which enables reliable distillation and precise collaboration through a knowledge quality gate that blocks erroneous information and a tail-class compensation mechanism that alleviates knowledge scarcity for tail categories. Furthermore, we design a consensus error calibration module that suppresses consensus high-confidence negative classes to correct collective misjudgments and steer optimization in the right direction. Extensive experiments on five long-tailed benchmarks demonstrate that TCL achieves the best performance, raising Top-1 accuracy on CIFAR100-LT to 58.7%, a gain of 2.4% over previous SOTA methods.