Fair Loss: Margin-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Deep Face Recognition

Recently, large-margin softmax loss methods, such as angular softmax loss (SphereFace), large margin cosine loss (CosFace), and additive angular margin loss (ArcFace), have demonstrated impressive performance on deep face recognition. These methods incorporate a fixed additive margin to all the classes, ignoring the class imbalance problem. However, imbalanced problem widely exists in various real-world face datasets, in which samples from some classes are in a higher number than others. We argue that the number of a class would influence its demand for the additive margin. In this paper, we introduce a new margin-aware reinforcement learning based loss function, namely fair loss, in which each class will learn an appropriate adaptive margin by Deep Q-learning. Specifically, we train an agent to learn a margin adaptive strategy for each class, and make the additive margins for different classes more reasonable. Our method has better performance than present large-margin loss functions on three benchmarks, Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW), Youtube Faces (YTF) and MegaFace, which demonstrates that our method could learn better face representation on imbalanced face datasets.