Making Pre-trained Language Models Good Long-tailed Learners

Prompt-tuning has shown appealing performance in few-shot classification by virtue of its capability in effectively exploiting pre-trained knowledge. This motivates us to check the hypothesis that prompt-tuning is also a promising choice for long-tailed classification, since the tail classes are intuitively few-shot ones. To achieve this aim, we conduct empirical studies to examine the hypothesis. The results demonstrate that prompt-tuning exactly makes pre-trained language models at least good long-tailed learners. For intuitions on why prompt-tuning can achieve good performance in long-tailed classification, we carry out an in-depth analysis by progressively bridging the gap between prompt-tuning and commonly used fine-tuning. The summary is that the classifier structure and parameterization form the key to making good long-tailed learners, in comparison with the less important input structure. Finally, we verify the applicability of our finding to few-shot classification.