No Arabic abstract
Model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) is a popular method for few-shot learning but assumes that we have access to the meta-training set. In practice, training on the meta-training set may not always be an option due to data privacy concerns, intellectual property issues, or merely lack of computing resources. In this paper, we consider the novel problem of repurposing pretrained MAML checkpoints to solve new few-shot classification tasks. Because of the potential distribution mismatch, the original MAML steps may no longer be optimal. Therefore we propose an alternative meta-testing procedure and combine MAML gradient steps with adversarial training and uncertainty-based stepsize adaptation. Our method outperforms vanilla MAML on same-domain and cross-domains benchmarks using both SGD and Adam optimizers and shows improved robustness to the choice of base stepsize.
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.
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.
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 few-shot classification, we are interested in learning algorithms that train a classifier from only a handful of labeled examples. Recent progress in few-shot classification has featured meta-learning, in which a parameterized model for a learning algorithm is defined and trained on episodes representing different classification problems, each with a small labeled training set and its corresponding test set. In this work, we advance this few-shot classification paradigm towards a scenario where unlabeled examples are also available within each episode. We consider two situations: one where all unlabeled examples are assumed to belong to the same set of classes as the labeled examples of the episode, as well as the more challenging situation where examples from other distractor classes are also provided. To address this paradigm, we propose novel extensions of Prototypical Networks (Snell et al., 2017) that are augmented with the ability to use unlabeled examples when producing prototypes. These models are trained in an end-to-end way on episodes, to learn to leverage the unlabeled examples successfully. We evaluate these methods
Recent algorithms with state-of-the-art few-shot classification results start their procedure by computing data features output by a large pretrained model. In this paper we systematically investigate which models provide the best representations for a few-shot image classification task when pretrained on the Imagenet dataset. We test their representations when used as the starting point for different few-shot classification algorithms. We observe that models trained on a supervised classification task have higher performance than models trained in an unsupervised manner even when transferred to out-of-distribution datasets. Models trained with adversarial robustness transfer better, while having slightly lower accuracy than supervised models.