# CLEAR: Class-wise Expert Aggregation with Structured Sampling for Long-Tailed Classification

Source: [CLEAR: Class-wise Expert Aggregation with Structured Sampling for Long-Tailed Classification](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/6a7d4f684b236a9bba1a2091>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-08-14T05:00:04.744Z

Authors: Gawon Lim

Published: 2026-08-11T15:45:09.000Z

## Abstract

Long-tailed classification poses a reliability challenge because models trained on imbalanced data are unevenly reliable across frequent and underrepresented classes. While existing methods address imbalance through re-balancing, adjustment, representation learning, or multi-expert modeling, they rarely estimate which expert should be trusted for each class. This paper proposes CLEAR (Class-wise reLiability-aware Expert Aggregation for long-tailed Recognition), a modular ensemble framework for long-tailed classification. CLEAR generates diverse experts through threshold-based structured sampling while preserving the full label space, then estimates a class-wise trust score for each expert using a smoothed class-wise precision formulation. During inference, expert predictions are combined through class-wise generalized product-of-experts aggregation, allowing different experts to be emphasized for different classes. Experiments on CIFAR-100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and Places-LT across multiple backbones show that CLEAR achieves competitive overall accuracy and particularly strong few-shot performance. These results support class-wise expert reliability as a useful design principle for long-tailed ensemble learning.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11287>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.11287.pdf>)
