Asymmetric Loss

Learn about asymmetric loss for both single-label and multi-label classification tasks.

Asymmetric loss is different from standard loss functions. It operates differently on both positive and negative samples.

It’s extremely useful as a loss function for multi-label classification tasks. We can classify an image into a few positive labels and many negative labels, which will result in a positive-negative imbalance situation, making it harder to optimize.

Asymmetric loss mitigates this issue by dynamically down-weighting negative samples with high confidence. It’ll discard any potential mislabeled samples. It’s easy to implement without any increase in training time or complexity. The PyTorch Image Model provides two different asymmetric losses:

  • AsymmetricLossSingleLabel
  • AsymmetricLossMultiLabel

The AsymmetricLossSingleLabel module

The AsymmetricLossSingleLabel works best for problems that only require a single label as the prediction.

Experiment with the interactive playgrounds below to learn more.

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