We propose prototypical networks for the problem of few-shot classification, where a classifier must generalize to new classes not seen in the training set, given only a small number of examples of each new class. Prototypical networks learn a metric space in which classification can be performed by computing distances to prototype representations of each class. Compared to recent approaches for few-shot learning, they reflect a simpler inductive bias that is beneficial in this limited-data regime, and achieve excellent results. We provide an analysis showing that some simple design decisions can yield substantial improvements over recent approaches involving complicated architectural choices and meta-learning. We further extend prototypical networks to zero-shot learning and achieve state-of-theart results on the CU-Birds dataset.

We present a conceptually simple, flexible, and general framework for few-shot learning, where a classifier must learn to recognise new classes given only few examples from each. Our method, called the Relation Network (RN), is trained end-to-end from scratch. During meta-learning, it learns to learn a deep distance metric to compare a small number of images within episodes, each of which is designed to simulate the few-shot setting. Once trained, a RN is able to classify images of new classes by computing relation scores between query images and the few examples of each new class without further updating the network. Besides providing improved performance on few-shot learning, our framework is easily extended to zero-shot learning. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that our simple approach provides a unified and effective approach for both of these two tasks.

很少有图像分类是一个具有挑战性的问题，旨在仅基于少量培训图像来达到人类的识别水平。少数图像分类的一种主要解决方案是深度度量学习。这些方法是，通过将看不见的样本根据距离的距离进行分类，可在强大的深神经网络中学到的嵌入空间中看到的样品，可以避免以少数图像分类的少数训练图像过度拟合，并实现了最新的图像表现。在本文中，我们提供了对深度度量学习方法的最新审查，以进行2018年至2022年的少量图像分类，并根据度量学习的三个阶段将它们分为三组，即学习功能嵌入，学习课堂表示和学习距离措施。通过这种分类法，我们确定了他们面临的不同方法和问题的新颖性。我们通过讨论当前的挑战和未来趋势进行了少量图像分类的讨论。

epiSodic学习是对几枪学习感兴趣的研究人员和从业者的流行练习。它包括在一系列学习问题（或剧集）中组织培训，每个人分为小型训练和验证子集，以模仿评估期间遇到的情况。但这总是必要吗？在本文中，我们调查了在集发作的级别使用非参数方法，例如最近邻居等方法的焦点学习的有用性。对于这些方法，我们不仅展示了广州学习的限制是如何不必要的，而是他们实际上导致利用培训批次的数据低效方式。我们通过匹配和原型网络进行广泛的消融实验，其中两个最流行的方法在集中的级别使用非参数方法。他们的“非焦化”对应物具有很大的更简单，具有较少的近似参数，并在多个镜头分类数据集中提高它们的性能。

Few-shot learning has become essential for producing models that generalize from few examples. In this work, we identify that metric scaling and metric task conditioning are important to improve the performance of few-shot algorithms. Our analysis reveals that simple metric scaling completely changes the nature of few-shot algorithm parameter updates. Metric scaling provides improvements up to 14% in accuracy for certain metrics on the mini-Imagenet 5-way 5-shot classification task. We further propose a simple and effective way of conditioning a learner on the task sample set, resulting in learning a task-dependent metric space. Moreover, we propose and empirically test a practical end-to-end optimization procedure based on auxiliary task co-training to learn a task-dependent metric space. The resulting few-shot learning model based on the task-dependent scaled metric achieves state of the art on mini-Imagenet. We confirm these results on another few-shot dataset that we introduce in this paper based on CIFAR100. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ElementAI/TADAM.

Metric-based meta-learning is one of the de facto standards in few-shot learning. It composes of representation learning and metrics calculation designs. Previous works construct class representations in different ways, varying from mean output embedding to covariance and distributions. However, using embeddings in space lacks expressivity and cannot capture class information robustly, while statistical complex modeling poses difficulty to metric designs. In this work, we use tensor fields (``areas'') to model classes from the geometrical perspective for few-shot learning. We present a simple and effective method, dubbed hypersphere prototypes (HyperProto), where class information is represented by hyperspheres with dynamic sizes with two sets of learnable parameters: the hypersphere's center and the radius. Extending from points to areas, hyperspheres are much more expressive than embeddings. Moreover, it is more convenient to perform metric-based classification with hypersphere prototypes than statistical modeling, as we only need to calculate the distance from a data point to the surface of the hypersphere. Following this idea, we also develop two variants of prototypes under other measurements. Extensive experiments and analysis on few-shot learning tasks across NLP and CV and comparison with 20+ competitive baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

现代深度学习需要大规模广泛标记的数据集进行培训。少量学习旨在通过有效地从少数标记的例子中学习来缓解这个问题。在先前提出的少量视觉分类器中，假设对分类器决定的特征歧管具有不相关的特征尺寸和均匀特征方差。在这项工作中，我们专注于通过提出以低标签制度运行的差异敏感的模型来解决这一假设引起的限制。第一种方法简单的CNAP，采用基于分层正规的Mahalanobis距离基于距离的分类器，与现有神经自适应特征提取器的状态相结合，以在元数据集，迷你成像和分层图像基准基准上实现强大性能。我们进一步将这种方法扩展到转换学习设置，提出转导压盖。这种转换方法将软k-means参数细化过程与两步任务编码器相结合，以实现使用未标记数据的改进的测试时间分类精度。转导CNAP在元数据集上实现了最先进的性能。最后，我们探讨了我们的方法（简单和转换）的使用“开箱即用”持续和积极的学习。大规模基准的广泛实验表明了这一点的鲁棒性和多功能性，相对说话，简单的模型。所有培训的模型检查点和相应的源代码都已公开可用。

Learning with limited data is a key challenge for visual recognition. Many few-shot learning methods address this challenge by learning an instance embedding function from seen classes and apply the function to instances from unseen classes with limited labels. This style of transfer learning is task-agnostic: the embedding function is not learned optimally discriminative with respect to the unseen classes, where discerning among them leads to the target task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to adapt the instance embeddings to the target classification task with a set-to-set function, yielding embeddings that are task-specific and are discriminative. We empirically investigated various instantiations of such set-to-set functions and observed the Transformer is most effective -as it naturally satisfies key properties of our desired model. We denote this model as FEAT (few-shot embedding adaptation w/ Transformer) and validate it on both the standard few-shot classification benchmark and four extended few-shot learning settings with essential use cases, i.e., cross-domain, transductive, generalized few-shot learning, and low-shot learning. It archived consistent improvements over baseline models as well as previous methods, and established the new stateof-the-art results on two benchmarks.

Humans can quickly learn new visual concepts, perhaps because they can easily visualize or imagine what novel objects look like from different views. Incorporating this ability to hallucinate novel instances of new concepts might help machine vision systems perform better low-shot learning, i.e., learning concepts from few examples. We present a novel approach to low-shot learning that uses this idea. Our approach builds on recent progress in meta-learning ("learning to learn") by combining a meta-learner with a "hallucinator" that produces additional training examples, and optimizing both models jointly. Our hallucinator can be incorporated into a variety of meta-learners and provides significant gains: up to a 6 point boost in classification accuracy when only a single training example is available, yielding state-of-the-art performance on the challenging ImageNet low-shot classification benchmark.

在新课程训练时，几乎没有射击学习（FSL）方法通常假设具有准确标记的样品的清洁支持集。这个假设通常可能是不现实的：支持集，无论多么小，仍然可能包括标签错误的样本。因此，对标签噪声的鲁棒性对于FSL方法是实用的，但是这个问题令人惊讶地在很大程度上没有探索。为了解决FSL设置中标签错误的样品，我们做出了一些技术贡献。 （1）我们提供了简单而有效的特征聚合方法，改善了流行的FSL技术Protonet使用的原型。 （2）我们描述了一种嘈杂的噪声学习的新型变压器模型（TRANFS）。 TRANFS利用变压器的注意机制称重标记为错误的样品。 （3）最后，我们对迷你胶原和tieredimagenet的嘈杂版本进行了广泛的测试。我们的结果表明，TRANFS与清洁支持集的领先FSL方法相对应，但到目前为止，在存在标签噪声的情况下，它们的表现优于它们。

元学习已成为几乎没有图像分类的实用方法，在该方法中，“学习分类器的策略”是在标记的基础类别上进行元学习的，并且可以应用于具有新颖类的任务。我们删除了基类标签的要求，并通过无监督的元学习（UML）学习可通用的嵌入。具体而言，任务发作是在元训练过程中使用未标记的基本类别的数据增强构建的，并且我们将基于嵌入式的分类器应用于新的任务，并在元测试期间使用标记的少量示例。我们观察到两个元素在UML中扮演着重要角色，即进行样本任务和衡量实例之间的相似性的方法。因此，我们获得了具有两个简单修改的​​强基线 - 一个足够的采样策略，每情节有效地构建多个任务以及半分解的相似性。然后，我们利用来自两个方向的任务特征以获得进一步的改进。首先，合成的混淆实例被合并以帮助提取更多的判别嵌入。其次，我们利用额外的特定任务嵌入转换作为元训练期间的辅助组件，以促进预先适应的嵌入式的概括能力。几乎没有学习基准的实验证明，我们的方法比以前的UML方法优于先前的UML方法，并且比其监督变体获得了可比甚至更好的性能。

如果没有巨大的数据集，许多现代的深度学习技术就无法正常工作。同时，几个领域要求使用稀缺数据的方法。当样本具有变化的结构时，此问题甚至更为复杂。图表示学习技术最近已证明在各种领域中都成功。然而，当面对数据稀缺时，就业的体系结构表现不佳。另一方面，很少的学习允许在稀缺的数据制度中采用现代深度学习模型，而不会放弃其有效性。在这项工作中，我们解决了几乎没有图形分类的问题，这表明将简单的距离度量学习基线配备了最新的图形嵌入式嵌入者，可以在任务上获得竞争性结果。虽然体系结构的简单性足以超越更复杂的功能，它还可以直接添加。为此，我们表明可以通过鼓励任务条件的嵌入空间来获得其他改进。最后，我们提出了一种基于混合的在线数据增强技术，该技术在潜在空间中起作用，并显示其对任务的有效性。

It has been experimentally demonstrated that humans are able to learn in a manner that allows them to make predictions on categories for which they have not seen any examples (Malaviya et al., 2022). Sucholutsky and Schonlau (2020) have recently presented a machine learning approach that aims to do the same. They utilise synthetically generated data and demonstrate that it is possible to achieve sub-linear scaling and develop models that can learn to recognise N classes from M training samples where M is less than N - aka less-than-one shot learning. Their method was, however, defined for univariate or simple multivariate data (Sucholutsky et al., 2021). We extend it to work on large, high-dimensional and real-world datasets and empirically validate it in this new and challenging setting. We apply this method to learn previously unseen NLP tasks from very few examples (4, 8 or 16). We first generate compact, sophisticated less-than-one shot representations called soft-label prototypes which are fitted on training data, capturing the distribution of different classes across the input domain space. We then use a modified k-Nearest Neighbours classifier to demonstrate that soft-label prototypes can classify data competitively, even outperforming much more computationally complex few-shot learning methods.

Nearest-Neighbor (NN) classification has been proven as a simple and effective approach for few-shot learning. The query data can be classified efficiently by finding the nearest support class based on features extracted by pretrained deep models. However, NN-based methods are sensitive to the data distribution and may produce false prediction if the samples in the support set happen to lie around the distribution boundary of different classes. To solve this issue, we present P3DC-Shot, an improved nearest-neighbor based few-shot classification method empowered by prior-driven data calibration. Inspired by the distribution calibration technique which utilizes the distribution or statistics of the base classes to calibrate the data for few-shot tasks, we propose a novel discrete data calibration operation which is more suitable for NN-based few-shot classification. Specifically, we treat the prototypes representing each base class as priors and calibrate each support data based on its similarity to different base prototypes. Then, we perform NN classification using these discretely calibrated support data. Results from extensive experiments on various datasets show our efficient non-learning based method can outperform or at least comparable to SOTA methods which need additional learning steps.

Human vision is able to immediately recognize novel visual categories after seeing just one or a few training examples. We describe how to add a similar capability to ConvNet classifiers by directly setting the final layer weights from novel training examples during low-shot learning. We call this process weight imprinting as it directly sets weights for a new category based on an appropriately scaled copy of the embedding layer activations for that training example. The imprinting process provides a valuable complement to training with stochastic gradient descent, as it provides immediate good classification performance and an initialization for any further fine-tuning in the future. We show how this imprinting process is related to proxy-based embeddings. However, it differs in that only a single imprinted weight vector is learned for each novel category, rather than relying on a nearest-neighbor distance to training instances as typically used with embedding methods. Our experiments show that using averaging of imprinted weights provides better generalization than using nearest-neighbor instance embeddings.

Many meta-learning approaches for few-shot learning rely on simple base learners such as nearest-neighbor classifiers. However, even in the few-shot regime, discriminatively trained linear predictors can offer better generalization. We propose to use these predictors as base learners to learn representations for few-shot learning and show they offer better tradeoffs between feature size and performance across a range of few-shot recognition benchmarks. Our objective is to learn feature embeddings that generalize well under a linear classification rule for novel categories. To efficiently solve the objective, we exploit two properties of linear classifiers: implicit differentiation of the optimality conditions of the convex problem and the dual formulation of the optimization problem. This allows us to use highdimensional embeddings with improved generalization at a modest increase in computational overhead. Our approach, named MetaOptNet, achieves state-of-the-art performance on miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CIFAR-FS, and FC100 few-shot learning benchmarks. Our code is available online 1 .

很少有视觉识别是指从一些标记实例中识别新颖的视觉概念。通过将查询表示形式与类表征进行比较以预测查询实例的类别，许多少数射击的视觉识别方法采用了基于公制的元学习范式。但是，当前基于度量的方法通常平等地对待所有实例，因此通常会获得有偏见的类表示，考虑到并非所有实例在总结了类级表示的实例级表示时都同样重要。例如，某些实例可能包含无代表性的信息，例如过多的背景和无关概念的信息，这使结果偏差。为了解决上述问题，我们提出了一个新型的基于公制的元学习框架，称为实例自适应类别表示网络（ICRL-net），以进行几次视觉识别。具体而言，我们开发了一个自适应实例重新平衡网络，具有在生成班级表示，通过学习和分配自适应权重的不同实例中的自适应权重时，根据其在相应类的支持集中的相对意义来解决偏见的表示问题。此外，我们设计了改进的双线性实例表示，并结合了两个新型的结构损失，即，阶层内实例聚类损失和阶层间表示区分损失，以进一步调节实例重估过程并完善类表示。我们对四个通常采用的几个基准测试：Miniimagenet，Tieredimagenet，Cifar-FS和FC100数据集进行了广泛的实验。与最先进的方法相比，实验结果证明了我们的ICRL-NET的优势。

我们研究了如何在只有几个类别（几次拍摄设置）给出的一些样本时识别来自Unseen类别（开放式分类）的样本的问题。学习良好抽象的挑战是一个非常少数样本的课程使得从看不见的类别中检测样本非常困难;因此，开放式识别在少量拍摄设置中受到最小的关注。大多数开放式少量拍摄分类方法正规化SoftMax得分以表明开放类样本的均匀概率，但我们认为这种方法通常是不准确的，特别是在细粒度。相反，我们提出了一种新颖的示例性重建的元学习策略，用于共同检测开放类样本，以及通过基于度量的分类对来自观众的样本进行分类。充当类的代表的示例可以在训练数据集中提供或在特征域中估计。我们的框架，名为重建示例的基于少量拍摄的少量开放式分类器（Refofs），在各种数据集上测试，实验结果明确突出了我们作为新技术的方法。

Few-shot classification aims to learn a classifier to recognize unseen classes during training with limited labeled examples. While significant progress has been made, the growing complexity of network designs, meta-learning algorithms, and differences in implementation details make a fair comparison difficult. In this paper, we present 1) a consistent comparative analysis of several representative few-shot classification algorithms, with results showing that deeper backbones significantly reduce the performance differences among methods on datasets with limited domain differences, 2) a modified baseline method that surprisingly achieves competitive performance when compared with the state-of-the-art on both the mini-ImageNet and the CUB datasets, and 3) a new experimental setting for evaluating the cross-domain generalization ability for few-shot classification algorithms. Our results reveal that reducing intra-class variation is an important factor when the feature backbone is shallow, but not as critical when using deeper backbones. In a realistic cross-domain evaluation setting, we show that a baseline method with a standard fine-tuning practice compares favorably against other state-of-the-art few-shot learning algorithms.

Few-shot learning is a rapidly evolving area of research in machine learning where the goal is to classify unlabeled data with only one or "a few" labeled exemplary samples. Neural networks are typically trained to minimize a distance metric between labeled exemplary samples and a query set. Early few-shot approaches use an episodic training process to sub-sample the training data into few-shot batches. This training process matches the sub-sampling done on evaluation. Recently, conventional supervised training coupled with a cosine distance has achieved superior performance for few-shot. Despite the diversity of few-shot approaches over the past decade, most methods still rely on the cosine or Euclidean distance layer between the latent features of the trained network. In this work, we investigate the distributions of trained few-shot features and demonstrate that they can be roughly approximated as exponential distributions. Under this assumption of an exponential distribution, we propose a new maximum log-likelihood metric for few-shot architectures. We demonstrate that the proposed metric achieves superior performance accuracy w.r.t. conventional similarity metrics (e.g., cosine, Euclidean, etc.), and achieve state-of-the-art inductive few-shot performance. Further, additional gains can be achieved by carefully combining multiple metrics and neither of our methods require post-processing feature transformations, which are common to many algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate a novel iterative algorithm designed around our maximum log-likelihood approach that achieves state-of-the-art transductive few-shot performance when the evaluation data is imbalanced. We have made our code publicly available at https://github.com/samuelhess/MLL_FSL/.