No Arabic abstract
Despite the success that metric learning based approaches have achieved in few-shot learning, recent works reveal the ineffectiveness of their episodic training mode. In this paper, we point out two potential reasons for this problem: 1) the random episodic labels can only provide limited supervision information, while the relatedness information between the query and support samples is not fully exploited; 2) the meta-learner is usually constrained by the limited contextual information of the local episode. To overcome these problems, we propose a new Global Relatedness Decoupled-Distillation (GRDD) method using the global category knowledge and the Relatedness Decoupled-Distillation (RDD) strategy. Our GRDD learns new visual concepts quickly by imitating the habit of humans, i.e. learning from the deep knowledge distilled from the teacher. More specifically, we first train a global learner on the entire base subset using category labels as supervision to leverage the global context information of the categories. Then, the well-trained global learner is used to simulate the query-support relatedness in global dependencies. Finally, the distilled global query-support relatedness is explicitly used to train the meta-learner using the RDD strategy, with the goal of making the meta-learner more discriminative. The RDD strategy aims to decouple the dense query-support relatedness into the groups of sparse decoupled relatedness. Moreover, only the relatedness of a single support sample with other query samples is considered in each group. By distilling the sparse decoupled relatedness group by group, sharper relatedness can be effectively distilled to the meta-learner, thereby facilitating the learning of a discriminative meta-learner. We conduct extensive experiments on the miniImagenet and CIFAR-FS datasets, which show the state-of-the-art performance of our GRDD method.
In this work, we address the challenging task of few-shot segmentation. Previous few-shot segmentation methods mainly employ the information of support images as guidance for query image segmentation. Although some works propose to build cross-reference between support and query images, their extraction of query information still depends on the support images. We here propose to extract the information from the query itself independently to benefit the few-shot segmentation task. To this end, we first propose a prior extractor to learn the query information from the unlabeled images with our proposed global-local contrastive learning. Then, we extract a set of predetermined priors via this prior extractor. With the obtained priors, we generate the prior region maps for query images, which locate the objects, as guidance to perform cross interaction with support features. In such a way, the extraction of query information is detached from the support branch, overcoming the limitation by support, and could obtain more informative query clues to achieve better interaction. Without bells and whistles, the proposed approach achieves new state-of-the-art performance for the few-shot segmentation task on PASCAL-5$^{i}$ and COCO datasets.
Few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) portrays the problem of learning new concepts gradually, where only a few examples per concept are available to the learner. Due to the limited number of examples for training, the techniques developed for standard incremental learning cannot be applied verbatim to FSCIL. In this work, we introduce a distillation algorithm to address the problem of FSCIL and propose to make use of semantic information during training. To this end, we make use of word embeddings as semantic information which is cheap to obtain and which facilitate the distillation process. Furthermore, we propose a method based on an attention mechanism on multiple parallel embeddings of visual data to align visual and semantic vectors, which reduces issues related to catastrophic forgetting. Via experiments on MiniImageNet, CUB200, and CIFAR100 dataset, we establish new state-of-the-art results by outperforming existing approaches.
Few-shot object detection, which aims at detecting novel objects rapidly from extremely few annotated examples of previously unseen classes, has attracted significant research interest in the community. Most existing approaches employ the Faster R-CNN as basic detection framework, yet, due to the lack of tailored considerations for data-scarce scenario, their performance is often not satisfactory. In this paper, we look closely into the conventional Faster R-CNN and analyze its contradictions from two orthogonal perspectives, namely multi-stage (RPN vs. RCNN) and multi-task (classification vs. localization). To resolve these issues, we propose a simple yet effective architecture, named Decoupled Faster R-CNN (DeFRCN). To be concrete, we extend Faster R-CNN by introducing Gradient Decoupled Layer for multi-stage decoupling and Prototypical Calibration Block for multi-task decoupling. The former is a novel deep layer with redefining the feature-forward operation and gradient-backward operation for decoupling its subsequent layer and preceding layer, and the latter is an offline prototype-based classification model with taking the proposals from detector as input and boosting the original classification scores with additional pairwise scores for calibration. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show our framework is remarkably superior to other existing approaches and establishes a new state-of-the-art in few-shot literature.
Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to train a strong classifier using limited labeled examples. Many existing works take the meta-learning approach, sampling few-shot tasks in turn and optimizing the few-shot learners performance on classifying the query examples. In this paper, we point out two potential weaknesses of this approach. First, the sampled query examples may not provide sufficient supervision for the few-shot learner. Second, the effectiveness of meta-learning diminishes sharply with increasing shots (i.e., the number of training examples per class). To resolve these issues, we propose a novel objective to directly train the few-shot learner to perform like a strong classifier. Concretely, we associate each sampled few-shot task with a strong classifier, which is learned with ample labeled examples. The strong classifier has a better generalization ability and we use it to supervise the few-shot learner. We present an efficient way to construct the strong classifier, making our proposed objective an easily plug-and-play term to existing meta-learning based FSL methods. We validate our approach in combinations with many representative meta-learning methods. On several benchmark datasets including miniImageNet and tiredImageNet, our approach leads to a notable improvement across a variety of tasks. More importantly, with our approach, meta-learning based FSL methods can consistently outperform non-meta-learning based ones, even in a many-shot setting, greatly strengthening their applicability.
The robustness of deep learning models against adversarial attacks has received increasing attention in recent years. However, both deep learning and adversarial training rely on the availability of a large amount of labeled data and usually do not generalize well to new, unseen classes when only a few training samples are accessible. To address this problem, we explicitly introduce a new challenging problem -- how to learn a robust deep model with limited training samples per class, called defensive few-shot learning in this paper. Simply employing the existing adversarial training techniques in the literature cannot solve this problem. This is because few-shot learning needs to learn transferable knowledge from disjoint auxiliary data, and thus it is invalid to assume the sample-level distribution consistency between the training and test sets as commonly assumed in existing adversarial training techniques. In this paper, instead of assuming such a distribution consistency, we propose to make this assumption at a task-level in the episodic training paradigm in order to better transfer the defense knowledge. Furthermore, inside each task, we design a task-conditioned distribution constraint to narrow the distribution gap between clean and adversarial examples at a sample-level. These give rise to a novel mechanism called multi-level distribution based adversarial training (MDAT) for learning transferable adversarial defense. In addition, a unified $mathcal{F}_{beta}$ score is introduced to evaluate different defense methods under the same principle. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MDAT achieves higher effectiveness and robustness over existing alternatives in the few-shot case.