ELTA: An Enhancer against Long-Tail for Aesthetics-oriented Models

Real-world datasets often exhibit long-tailed distributions, compromising the generalization and fairness of learning-based models. This issue is particularly pronounced in Image Aesthetics Assessment (IAA) tasks, where such imbalance is difficult to mitigate due to a severe distribution mismatch between features and labels, as well as the great sensitivity of aesthetics to image variations. To address these issues, we propose an Enhancer against Long-Tail for Aesthetics-oriented models (ELTA). ELTA first utilizes a dedicated mixup technique to enhance minority feature representation in high-level space while preserving their intrinsic aesthetic qualities. Next, it aligns features and labels through a similarity consistency approach, effectively alleviating the distribution mismatch. Finally, ELTA adopts a specific strategy to refine the output distribution, thereby enhancing the quality of pseudo-labels. Experiments on four representative datasets (AVA, AADB, TAD66K, and PARA) show that our proposed ELTA achieves state-of-the-art performance by effectively mitigating the long-tailed issue in IAA datasets. Moreover, ELTA is designed with plug-and-play capabilities for seamless integration with existing methods. To our knowledge, this is the first contribution in the IAA community addressing long-tail. All resources are available in here.