No Arabic abstract
Existing approaches to few-shot learning deal with tasks that have persistent, rigid notions of classes. Typically, the learner observes data only from a fixed number of classes at training time and is asked to generalize to a new set of classes at test time. Two examples from the same class would always be assigned the same labels in any episode. In this work, we consider a realistic setting where the similarities between examples can change from episode to episode depending on the task context, which is not given to the learner. We define new benchmark datasets for this flexible few-shot scenario, where the tasks are based on images of faces (Celeb-A), shoes (Zappos50K), and general objects (ImageNet-with-Attributes). While classification baselines and episodic approaches learn representations that work well for standard few-shot learning, they suffer in our flexible tasks as novel similarity definitions arise during testing. We propose to build upon recent contrastive unsupervised learning techniques and use a combination of instance and class invariance learning, aiming to obtain general and flexible features. We find that our approach performs strongly on our new flexible few-shot learning benchmarks, demonstrating that unsupervised learning obtains more generalizable representations.
We propose a transductive Laplacian-regularized inference for few-shot tasks. Given any feature embedding learned from the base classes, we minimize a quadratic binary-assignment function containing two terms: (1) a unary term assigning query samples to the nearest class prototype, and (2) a pairwise Laplacian term encouraging nearby query samples to have consistent label assignments. Our transductive inference does not re-train the base model, and can be viewed as a graph clustering of the query set, subject to supervision constraints from the support set. We derive a computationally efficient bound optimizer of a relaxation of our function, which computes independent (parallel) updates for each query sample, while guaranteeing convergence. Following a simple cross-entropy training on the base classes, and without complex meta-learning strategies, we conducted comprehensive experiments over five few-shot learning benchmarks. Our LaplacianShot consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by significant margins across different models, settings, and data sets. Furthermore, our transductive inference is very fast, with computational times that are close to inductive inference, and can be used for large-scale few-shot tasks.
Machine learning classifiers are often trained to recognize a set of pre-defined classes. However, in many applications, it is often desirable to have the flexibility of learning additional concepts, with limited data and without re-training on the full training set. This paper addresses this problem, incremental few-shot learning, where a regular classification network has already been trained to recognize a set of base classes, and several extra novel classes are being considered, each with only a few labeled examples. After learning the novel classes, the model is then evaluated on the overall classification performance on both base and novel classes. To this end, we propose a meta-learning model, the Attention Attractor Network, which regularizes the learning of novel classes. In each episode, we train a set of new weights to recognize novel classes until they converge, and we show that the technique of recurrent back-propagation can back-propagate through the optimization process and facilitate the learning of these parameters. We demonstrate that the learned attractor network can help recognize novel classes while remembering old classes without the need to review the original training set, outperforming various baselines.
We are interested in developing a unified machine learning model over many mobile devices for practical learning tasks, where each device only has very few training data. This is a commonly encountered situation in mobile computing scenarios, where data is scarce and distributed while the tasks are distinct. In this paper, we propose a federated few-shot learning (FedFSL) framework to learn a few-shot classification model that can classify unseen data classes with only a few labeled samples. With the federated learning strategy, FedFSL can utilize many data sources while keeping data privacy and communication efficiency. There are two technical challenges: 1) directly using the existing federated learning approach may lead to misaligned decision boundaries produced by client models, and 2) constraining the decision boundaries to be similar over clients would overfit to training tasks but not adapt well to unseen tasks. To address these issues, we propose to regularize local updates by minimizing the divergence of client models. We also formulate the training in an adversarial fashion and optimize the client models to produce a discriminative feature space that can better represent unseen data samples. We demonstrate the intuitions and conduct experiments to show our approaches outperform baselines by more than 10% in learning vision tasks and 5% in language tasks.
In this article, we consider the problem of few-shot learning for classification. We assume a network trained for base categories with a large number of training examples, and we aim to add novel categories to it that have only a few, e.g., one or five, training examples. This is a challenging scenario because: 1) high performance is required in both the base and novel categories; and 2) training the network for the new categories with a few training examples can contaminate the feature space trained well for the base categories. To address these challenges, we propose two geometric constraints to fine-tune the network with a few training examples. The first constraint enables features of the novel categories to cluster near the category weights, and the second maintains the weights of the novel categories far from the weights of the base categories. By applying the proposed constraints, we extract discriminative features for the novel categories while preserving the feature space learned for the base categories. Using public data sets for few-shot learning that are subsets of ImageNet, we demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms prevalent methods by a large margin.
Few-Shot Learning (FSL) algorithms are commonly trained through Meta-Learning (ML), which exposes models to batches of tasks sampled from a meta-dataset to mimic tasks seen during evaluation. However, the standard training procedures overlook the real-world dynamics where classes commonly occur at different frequencies. While it is generally understood that class imbalance harms the performance of supervised methods, limited research examines the impact of imbalance on the FSL evaluation task. Our analysis compares 10 state-of-the-art meta-learning and FSL methods on different imbalance distributions and rebalancing techniques. Our results reveal that 1) some FSL methods display a natural disposition against imbalance while most other approaches produce a performance drop by up to 17% compared to the balanced task without the appropriate mitigation; 2) contrary to popular belief, many meta-learning algorithms will not automatically learn to balance from exposure to imbalanced training tasks; 3) classical rebalancing strategies, such as random oversampling, can still be very effective, leading to state-of-the-art performances and should not be overlooked; 4) FSL methods are more robust against meta-dataset imbalance than imbalance at the task-level with a similar imbalance ratio ($rho<20$), with the effect holding even in long-tail datasets under a larger imbalance ($rho=65$).