No Arabic abstract
Few-shot learning, which aims at extracting new concepts rapidly from extremely few examples of novel classes, has been featured into the meta-learning paradigm recently. Yet, the key challenge of how to learn a generalizable classifier with the capability of adapting to specific tasks with severely limited data still remains in this domain. To this end, we propose a Transductive Episodic-wise Adaptive Metric (TEAM) framework for few-shot learning, by integrating the meta-learning paradigm with both deep metric learning and transductive inference. With exploring the pairwise constraints and regularization prior within each task, we explicitly formulate the adaptation procedure into a standard semi-definite programming problem. By solving the problem with its closed-form solution on the fly with the setup of transduction, our approach efficiently tailors an episodic-wise metric for each task to adapt all features from a shared task-agnostic embedding space into a more discriminative task-specific metric space. Moreover, we further leverage an attention-based bi-directional similarity strategy for extracting the more robust relationship between queries and prototypes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our framework is superior to other existing approaches and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the few-shot literature.
We investigate a general formulation for clustering and transductive few-shot learning, which integrates prototype-based objectives, Laplacian regularization and supervision constraints from a few labeled data points. We propose a concave-convex relaxation of the problem, and derive a computationally efficient block-coordinate bound optimizer, with convergence guarantee. At each iteration,our optimizer computes independent (parallel) updates for each point-to-cluster assignment. Therefore, it could be trivially distributed for large-scale clustering and few-shot tasks. Furthermore, we provides a thorough convergence analysis based on point-to-set maps. Were port comprehensive clustering and few-shot learning experiments over various data sets, showing that our method yields competitive performances, in term of accuracy and optimization quality, while scaling up to large problems. Using standard training on the base classes, without resorting to complex meta-learning and episodic-training strategies, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art few-shot methods by significant margins, across various models, settings and data sets. Surprisingly, we found that even standard clustering procedures (e.g., K-means), which correspond to particular, non-regularized cases of our general model, already achieve competitive performances in comparison to the state-of-the-art in few-shot learning. These surprising results point to the limitations of the current few-shot benchmarks, and question the viability of a large body of convoluted few-shot learning techniques in the recent literature.
We present an efficient algorithm for model-free episodic reinforcement learning on large (potentially continuous) state-action spaces. Our algorithm is based on a novel $Q$-learning policy with adaptive data-driven discretization. The central idea is to maintain a finer partition of the state-action space in regions which are frequently visited in historical trajectories, and have higher payoff estimates. We demonstrate how our adaptive partitions take advantage of the shape of the optimal $Q$-function and the joint space, without sacrificing the worst-case performance. In particular, we recover the regret guarantees of prior algorithms for continuous state-action spaces, which additionally require either an optimal discretization as input, and/or access to a simulation oracle. Moreover, experiments demonstrate how our algorithm automatically adapts to the underlying structure of the problem, resulting in much better performance compared both to heuristics and $Q$-learning with uniform discretization.
Few-shot learning aims to train a classifier that can generalize well when just a small number of labeled samples per class are given. We introduce Transductive Maximum Margin Classifier (TMMC) for few-shot learning. The basic idea of the classical maximum margin classifier is to solve an optimal prediction function that the corresponding separating hyperplane can correctly divide the training data and the resulting classifier has the largest geometric margin. In few-shot learning scenarios, the training samples are scarce, not enough to find a separating hyperplane with good generalization ability on unseen data. TMMC is constructed using a mixture of the labeled support set and the unlabeled query set in a given task. The unlabeled samples in the query set can adjust the separating hyperplane so that the prediction function is optimal on both the labeled and unlabeled samples. Furthermore, we leverage an efficient and effective quasi-Newton algorithm, the L-BFGS method to optimize TMMC. Experimental results on three standard few-shot learning benchmarks including miniImagenet, tieredImagenet and CUB suggest that our TMMC achieves state-of-the-art accuracies.
We uncover an ever-overlooked deficiency in the prevailing Few-Shot Learning (FSL) methods: the pre-trained knowledge is indeed a confounder that limits the performance. This finding is rooted from our causal assumption: a Structural Causal Model (SCM) for the causalities among the pre-trained knowledge, sample features, and labels. Thanks to it, we propose a novel FSL paradigm: Interventional Few-Shot Learning (IFSL). Specifically, we develop three effective IFSL algorithmic implementations based on the backdoor adjustment, which is essentially a causal intervention towards the SCM of many-shot learning: the upper-bound of FSL in a causal view. It is worth noting that the contribution of IFSL is orthogonal to existing fine-tuning and meta-learning based FSL methods, hence IFSL can improve all of them, achieving a new 1-/5-shot state-of-the-art on textit{mini}ImageNet, textit{tiered}ImageNet, and cross-domain CUB. Code is released at https://github.com/yue-zhongqi/ifsl.
Existing few-shot learning (FSL) methods assume that there exist sufficient training samples from source classes for knowledge transfer to target classes with few training samples. However, this assumption is often invalid, especially when it comes to fine-grained recognition. In this work, we define a new FSL setting termed few-shot fewshot learning (FSFSL), under which both the source and target classes have limited training samples. To overcome the source class data scarcity problem, a natural option is to crawl images from the web with class names as search keywords. However, the crawled images are inevitably corrupted by large amount of noise (irrelevant images) and thus may harm the performance. To address this problem, we propose a graph convolutional network (GCN)-based label denoising (LDN) method to remove the irrelevant images. Further, with the cleaned web images as well as the original clean training images, we propose a GCN-based FSL method. For both the LDN and FSL tasks, a novel adaptive aggregation GCN (AdarGCN) model is proposed, which differs from existing GCN models in that adaptive aggregation is performed based on a multi-head multi-level aggregation module. With AdarGCN, how much and how far information carried by each graph node is propagated in the graph structure can be determined automatically, therefore alleviating the effects of both noisy and outlying training samples. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of our AdarGCN under both the new FSFSL and the conventional FSL settings.