Meta-Prototypical Learning for Domain-Agnostic Few-Shot Recognition

• Published in: IEEE transaction on neural networks and learning systems Vol. 33; no. 11; pp. 6990 - 6996
• Main Authors: Wang, Rui-Qi, Zhang, Xu-Yao, Liu, Cheng-Lin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.11.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptation models; Coders; Domain-agnostic few-shot recognition; Domains; Image classification; Learning; Learning systems; meta-learning; Object recognition; Pattern recognition; Prototypes; prototypical learning; Task analysis; Task complexity; Testing; Training
• ISSN: 2162-237X; 2162-2388; 2162-2388
• DOI: 10.1109/TNNLS.2021.3083650

Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to classify novel images based on a few labeled samples with the help of meta-knowledge. Most previous works address this problem based on the hypothesis that the training set and testing set are from the same domain, which is not realistic for some real-world applications. Thus, we extend FSL to domain-agnostic few-shot recognition, where the domain of the testing task is unknown. In domain-agnostic few-shot recognition, the model is optimized on data from one domain and evaluated on tasks from different domains. Previous methods for FSL mostly focus on learning general features or adapting to few-shot tasks effectively. They suffer from inappropriate features or complex adaptation in domain-agnostic few-shot recognition. In this brief, we propose meta-prototypical learning to address this problem. In particular, a meta-encoder is optimized to learn the general features. Different from the traditional prototypical learning, the meta encoder can effectively adapt to few-shot tasks from different domains by the traces of the few labeled examples. Experiments on many datasets demonstrate that meta-prototypical learning performs competitively on traditional few-shot tasks, and on few-shot tasks from different domains, meta-prototypical learning outperforms related methods.