[Submitted on 10 Jul 2026 (v1), last revised 21 Jul 2026 (this version, v2)]

View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract:Class imbalance poses a fundamental challenge in risk-sensitive applications such as fraud detection and medical diagnosis, where minority-class samples are scarce yet critical for accurate classification. Existing oversampling methods generate synthetic samples to rebalance class distributions; however, they often produce large numbers of low-quality candidates that distort decision boundaries or introduce artifacts, leading to overfitting and degraded generalization.
In this work, we introduce RUBRIC, a generator-agnostic filtering framework that formulates synthetic sample selection as a quality-over-quantity optimization problem. RUBRIC ranks candidates using a realism-utility trade-off: realism is quantified by a learned discriminator that distinguishes real samples from synthetic samples, while utility captures proximity to the decision boundary through a concave margin-based scoring function. We show that, under mild regularity conditions, the proposed filtering strategy monotonically tightens the generalization bound for margin-based classifiers by jointly reducing distribution shift and suppressing near-negative tail contributions.
Through extensive experiments on credit-card fraud detection and other imbalanced benchmarks, we demonstrate that RUBRIC improves F1-macro and recall while maintaining comparable ROC-AUC across several generators. We also provide explicit lambda-sensitivity analysis to show how users can recover AUPRC when ranking quality is prioritized.

Submission history

From: Dong Liu [view email]
[v1] Fri, 10 Jul 2026 06:37:12 UTC (6,452 KB)
[v2] Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:33:53 UTC (6,452 KB)