Head Tail Open: Open Tailed Classification of Imbalanced Document Data

Deep learning models for scanned document image classification and form understanding have made significant progress in the last few years. High accuracy can be achieved by a model with the help of copious amounts of labelled training data for closed-world classification. However, very little work has been done in the domain of fine-grained and head-tailed (class imbalance with some classes having high numbers of data points and some having a low number of data points) open-world classification for documents. Our proposed method achieves a better classification results than the baseline of the head-tail-novel/open dataset. Our techniques include separating the head-tail classes and transferring the knowledge from head data to the tail data. This transfer of knowledge also improves the capability of recognizing a novel category by 15% as compared to the baseline.