Balancing Model Efficiency and Performance: Adaptive Pruner for Long-tailed Data

Long-tailed distribution datasets are prevalent in many machine learning tasks, yet existing neural network models still face significant challenges when handling such data. This paper proposes a novel adaptive pruning strategy, LTAP (Long-Tailed Adaptive Pruner), aimed at balancing model efficiency and performance to better address the challenges posed by long-tailed data distributions. LTAP introduces multi-dimensional importance scoring criteria and designs a dynamic weight adjustment mechanism to adaptively determine the pruning priority of parameters for different classes. By focusing on protecting parameters critical for tail classes, LTAP significantly enhances computational efficiency while maintaining model performance. This method combines the strengths of long-tailed learning and neural network pruning, overcoming the limitations of existing approaches in handling imbalanced data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LTAP outperforms existing methods on various long-tailed datasets, achieving a good balance between model compression rate, computational efficiency, and classification accuracy. This research provides new insights into solving model optimization problems in long-tailed learning and is significant for improving the performance of neural networks on imbalanced datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/DataLab-atom/LT-VOTE. © 2025 by the author(s).