CAMRI Loss: Improving the Recall of a Specific Class without Sacrificing Accuracy

In real world applications of multiclass classification models, misclassification in an important class (e.g., stop sign) can be significantly more harmful than in other classes (e.g., no parking). Thus, it is crucial to improve the recall of an important class while maintaining overall accuracy. For this problem, we found that improving the separation of important classes relative to other classes in the feature space is effective. Existing methods that give a class-sensitive penalty for cross-entropy loss do not improve the separation. Moreover, the methods designed to improve separations between all classes are unsuitable for our purpose because they do not consider the important classes. To achieve the separation, we propose a loss function that explicitly gives loss for the feature space, called class-sensitive additive angular margin (CAMRI) loss. CAMRI loss is expected to reduce the variance of an important class due to the addition of a penalty to the angle between the important class features and the corresponding weight vectors in the feature space. In addition, concentrating the penalty on only the important class hardly sacrifices separating the other classes. Experiments on CIFAR-10, GTSRB, and AwA2 showed that CAMRI loss could improve the recall of a specific class without sacrificing accuracy. In particular, compared with GTSRB's second-worst class recall when trained with cross-entropy loss, CAMRI loss improved recall by 9%.