Few-Shot Learning via Embedding Adaptation with Set-to-Set Functions

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 state-of-the-art results on two benchmarks.Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2020; The code is available at https://github.com/Sha-Lab/FEA

Adapted Deep Embeddings: A Synthesis of Methods for kk-Shot Inductive Transfer Learning

The focus in machine learning has branched beyond training classifiers on a single task to investigating how previously acquired knowledge in a source domain can be leveraged to facilitate learning in a related target domain, known as inductive transfer learning. Three active lines of research have independently explored transfer learning using neural networks. In weight transfer, a model trained on the source domain is used as an initialization point for a network to be trained on the target domain. In deep metric learning, the source domain is used to construct an embedding that captures class structure in both the source and target domains. In few-shot learning, the focus is on generalizing well in the target domain based on a limited number of labeled examples. We compare state-of-the-art methods from these three paradigms and also explore hybrid adapted-embedding methods that use limited target-domain data to fine tune embeddings constructed from source-domain data. We conduct a systematic comparison of methods in a variety of domains, varying the number of labeled instances available in the target domain ($k$), as well as the number of target-domain classes. We reach three principal conclusions: (1) Deep embeddings are far superior, compared to weight transfer, as a starting point for inter-domain transfer or model re-use (2) Our hybrid methods robustly outperform every few-shot learning and every deep metric learning method previously proposed, with a mean error reduction of 34% over state-of-the-art. (3) Among loss functions for discovering embeddings, the histogram loss (Ustinova & Lempitsky, 2016) is most robust. We hope our results will motivate a unification of research in weight transfer, deep metric learning, and few-shot learning

Semi-Supervised and Active Few-Shot Learning with Prototypical Networks

We consider the problem of semi-supervised few-shot classification where a classifier needs to adapt to new tasks using a few labeled examples and (potentially many) unlabeled examples. We propose a clustering approach to the problem. The features extracted with Prototypical Networks are clustered using $K$-means with the few labeled examples guiding the clustering process. We note that in many real-world applications the adaptation performance can be significantly improved by requesting the few labels through user feedback. We demonstrate good performance of the active adaptation strategy using image data

Learning to learn via Self-Critique

In few-shot learning, a machine learning system learns from a small set of labelled examples relating to a specific task, such that it can generalize to new examples of the same task. Given the limited availability of labelled examples in such tasks, we wish to make use of all the information we can. Usually a model learns task-specific information from a small training-set (support-set) to predict on an unlabelled validation set (target-set). The target-set contains additional task-specific information which is not utilized by existing few-shot learning methods. Making use of the target-set examples via transductive learning requires approaches beyond the current methods; at inference time, the target-set contains only unlabelled input data-points, and so discriminative learning cannot be used. In this paper, we propose a framework called Self-Critique and Adapt or SCA, which learns to learn a label-free loss function, parameterized as a neural network. A base-model learns on a support-set using existing methods (e.g. stochastic gradient descent combined with the cross-entropy loss), and then is updated for the incoming target-task using the learnt loss function. This label-free loss function is itself optimized such that the learnt model achieves higher generalization performance. Experiments demonstrate that SCA offers substantially reduced error-rates compared to baselines which only adapt on the support-set, and results in state of the art benchmark performance on Mini-ImageNet and Caltech-UCSD Birds 200.Comment: Accepted in NeurIPS 201

Few-Shot Adaptation for Multimedia Semantic Indexing

We propose a few-shot adaptation framework, which bridges zero-shot learning and supervised many-shot learning, for semantic indexing of image and video data. Few-shot adaptation provides robust parameter estimation with few training examples, by optimizing the parameters of zero-shot learning and supervised many-shot learning simultaneously. In this method, first we build a zero-shot detector, and then update it by using the few examples. Our experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed framework on three datasets: TRECVID Semantic Indexing 2010, 2014, and ImageNET. On the ImageNET dataset, we show that our method outperforms recent few-shot learning methods. On the TRECVID 2014 dataset, we achieve 15.19% and 35.98% in Mean Average Precision under the zero-shot condition and the supervised condition, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, these are the best results on this dataset

A Simple Exponential Family Framework for Zero-Shot Learning

We present a simple generative framework for learning to predict previously unseen classes, based on estimating class-attribute-gated class-conditional distributions. We model each class-conditional distribution as an exponential family distribution and the parameters of the distribution of each seen/unseen class are defined as functions of the respective observed class attributes. These functions can be learned using only the seen class data and can be used to predict the parameters of the class-conditional distribution of each unseen class. Unlike most existing methods for zero-shot learning that represent classes as fixed embeddings in some vector space, our generative model naturally represents each class as a probability distribution. It is simple to implement and also allows leveraging additional unlabeled data from unseen classes to improve the estimates of their class-conditional distributions using transductive/semi-supervised learning. Moreover, it extends seamlessly to few-shot learning by easily updating these distributions when provided with a small number of additional labelled examples from unseen classes. Through a comprehensive set of experiments on several benchmark data sets, we demonstrate the efficacy of our framework.Comment: Accepted in ECML-PKDD 2017, 16 Pages: Code and Data are available: https://github.com/vkverma01/Zero-Shot

Hierarchically Structured Meta-learning

In order to learn quickly with few samples, meta-learning utilizes prior knowledge learned from previous tasks. However, a critical challenge in meta-learning is task uncertainty and heterogeneity, which can not be handled via globally sharing knowledge among tasks. In this paper, based on gradient-based meta-learning, we propose a hierarchically structured meta-learning (HSML) algorithm that explicitly tailors the transferable knowledge to different clusters of tasks. Inspired by the way human beings organize knowledge, we resort to a hierarchical task clustering structure to cluster tasks. As a result, the proposed approach not only addresses the challenge via the knowledge customization to different clusters of tasks, but also preserves knowledge generalization among a cluster of similar tasks. To tackle the changing of task relationship, in addition, we extend the hierarchical structure to a continual learning environment. The experimental results show that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance in both toy-regression and few-shot image classification problems.Comment: ICML 2019; Errata: this version fix the results of A1 in Table 1

Recent Advances in Zero-shot Recognition

With the recent renaissance of deep convolution neural networks, encouraging breakthroughs have been achieved on the supervised recognition tasks, where each class has sufficient training data and fully annotated training data. However, to scale the recognition to a large number of classes with few or now training samples for each class remains an unsolved problem. One approach to scaling up the recognition is to develop models capable of recognizing unseen categories without any training instances, or zero-shot recognition/ learning. This article provides a comprehensive review of existing zero-shot recognition techniques covering various aspects ranging from representations of models, and from datasets and evaluation settings. We also overview related recognition tasks including one-shot and open set recognition which can be used as natural extensions of zero-shot recognition when limited number of class samples become available or when zero-shot recognition is implemented in a real-world setting. Importantly, we highlight the limitations of existing approaches and point out future research directions in this existing new research area.Comment: accepted by IEEE Signal Processing Magazin

Adaptive Deep Kernel Learning

Deep kernel learning provides an elegant and principled framework for combining the structural properties of deep learning algorithms with the flexibility of kernel methods. By means of a deep neural network, we learn a parametrized kernel operator that can be combined with a differentiable kernel algorithm during inference. While previous work within this framework has focused on learning a single kernel for large datasets, we learn a kernel family for a variety of few-shot regression tasks. Compared to single deep kernel learning, our algorithm enables the identification of the appropriate kernel for each task during inference. As such, it is well adapted for complex task distributions in a few-shot learning setting, which we demonstrate by comparing against existing state-of-the-art algorithms using real-world, few-shot regression tasks related to the field of drug discovery

Learning Robust Visual-Semantic Embeddings

Many of the existing methods for learning joint embedding of images and text use only supervised information from paired images and its textual attributes. Taking advantage of the recent success of unsupervised learning in deep neural networks, we propose an end-to-end learning framework that is able to extract more robust multi-modal representations across domains. The proposed method combines representation learning models (i.e., auto-encoders) together with cross-domain learning criteria (i.e., Maximum Mean Discrepancy loss) to learn joint embeddings for semantic and visual features. A novel technique of unsupervised-data adaptation inference is introduced to construct more comprehensive embeddings for both labeled and unlabeled data. We evaluate our method on Animals with Attributes and Caltech-UCSD Birds 200-2011 dataset with a wide range of applications, including zero and few-shot image recognition and retrieval, from inductive to transductive settings. Empirically, we show that our framework improves over the current state of the art on many of the considered tasks.Comment: 12 page