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AnyLoss: Transforming Classification Metrics into Loss Functions (arxiv.org)
1 point by Anon84 on May 28, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Scores like precision or recall are usually just tallies of right and wrong answers, so a model can't learn from them directly. This trick smooths those tallies so any such score becomes a trainable loss, working especially well on lopsided data without slow tuning.

Abstract

Many evaluation metrics can be used to assess the performance of models in binary classification tasks. However, most of them are derived from a confusion matrix in a non-differentiable form, making it very difficult to generate a differentiable loss function that could directly optimize them. The lack of solutions to bridge this challenge not only hinders our ability to solve difficult tasks, such as imbalanced learning, but also requires the deployment of computationally expensive hyperparameter search processes in model selection. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose approach that transforms any confusion matrix-based metric into a loss function, \textit{AnyLoss}, that is available in optimization processes. To this end, we use an approximation function to make a confusion matrix represented in a differentiable form, and this approach enables any confusion matrix-based metric to be directly used as a loss function. The mechanism of the approximation function is provided to ensure its operability and the differentiability of our loss functions is proved by suggesting their derivatives. We conduct extensive experiments under diverse neural networks with many datasets, and we demonstrate their general availability to target any confusion matrix-based metrics. Our method, especially, shows outstanding achievements in dealing with imbalanced datasets, and its competitive learning speed, compared to multiple baseline models, underscores its efficiency.

Doheon Han, Nuno Moniz, Nitesh V Chawla
arXiv:2405.14745 · cs.LG · submitted May 23, 2024
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