RetinaNet 采用Focal loss解决样本不均衡问题

Hard negative mining After the matching step, most of the default boxes are negatives, especially when the number of possible default boxes is large. This introduces a significant imbalance between the positive and negative training examples. Instead of using all the negative examples, we sort them using the highest confidence loss for each default box and pick the top ones so that the ratio between the negatives and positives is at most 3:1. We found that this leads to faster optimization and a more stable training.

在SSD中筛选出有代表性的（置信损失大的）负样本参与训练，正负样本比例控制在1:3。有没有更柔性的办法来控制负样本参与训练呢？

我们认识到了训练阶段的（正负）类不均衡是单阶段检测器实现不了最先进准确度的主要干扰。
To achieve this result, we identify class imbalance during training as the main obstacle impeding one-stage detector from achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and propose a new loss function that eliminates this barrier.
以往的两阶段检测算法中执行这样的策略在前景和背景之间保持可管理的平衡。
In the second classification stage, sampling heuristics, such as a fixed foreground-to-background ratio (1:3), or online hard example mining (OHEM) [31], are performed to maintain a manageable balance between foreground and background.

The loss function is a dynamically scaled cross entropy loss, where the scaling factor decays to zero as confidence in the correct class increases, see Figure 1. Intuitively, this scaling factor can automatically down-weight the contribution of easy examples during training and rapidly focus the model on hard examples.
Class Imbalance: Both classic one-stage object detection methods, like boosted detectors [37, 5] and DPMs [8], and more recent methods, like SSD [22], face a large class imbalance during training. These detectors evaluate candidate locations per image but only a few locations contain objects. This imbalance causes two problems:
(1) training is inefficient as most locations are easy negatives that contribute no useful learning signal; (2) the easy negatives can overwhelm training and lead to degenerate models.
A common solution is to perform some form of hard negative mining [33, 37, 8, 31, 22] that samples hard examples during training or more complex sampling/reweighing schemes [2]. In contrast, we show that our proposed focal loss naturally handles the class imbalance faced by a one-stage detector and allows us to efficiently train on all examples without sampling and without easy negatives overwhelming the loss and computed gradients.

正负样本不均衡问题表