Learning Flexible Classifiers with Shot-CONditional Episodic (SCONE) TrainingDownload PDF

28 Sept 2020 (modified: 05 May 2023)ICLR 2021 Conference Blind SubmissionReaders: Everyone
Keywords: few-shot classification, few-shot learning, episodic training, meta-learning
Abstract: Early few-shot classification work advocates for episodic training, i.e. training over learning episodes each posing a few-shot classification task. However, the role of this training regime remains poorly understood, and its usefulness is still debated. Standard classification training methods (``pre-training'') followed by episodic fine-tuning have recently achieved strong results. This work aims to understand the role of this episodic fine-tuning phase through an exploration of the effect of the ``shot'' setting (number of examples per class) that is used during fine-tuning. We discover that fine-tuning on episodes of a particular shot can specialize the pre-trained model to solving episodes of that shot at the expense of performance on other shots, in agreement with a trade-off recently observed in the context of end-to-end episodic training. To amend this, we propose a shot-conditional form of episodic fine-tuning, inspired from recent work that trains a single model on a distribution of losses. Our investigation shows that this improves overall performance, without suffering disproportionately on any shot. We also examine the usefulness of this approach on the large-scale Meta-Dataset benchmark where test episodes exhibit varying shots and imbalanced classes. We find that our flexible model improves performance in that challenging environment.
One-sentence Summary: We propose a form of episodic training that allows a model to flexibly solve few-shot classification tasks of a wide range of shots, leading to improved performance on a challenging environment.
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