Rectifying the Shortcut Learning of Background for Few-Shot Learning

Xu Luo, Longhui Wei, Liangjian Wen, Jinrong Yang, Lingxi Xie, Zenglin Xu, Qi Tian

Keywords: Few-Shot Learning, Foreground and Background, Shortcut Learning, Contrastive Learning

Abstract: The category gap between training and evaluation has been characterised as one of the main obstacles to the success of Few-Shot Learning (FSL). In this paper, we for the first time empirically identify image background, common in realistic images, as a shortcut knowledge helpful for in-class classification but ungeneralizable beyond training categories in FSL. A novel framework, COSOC, is designed to tackle this problem by extracting foreground objects in images at both training and evaluation without any extra supervision. Extensive experiments carried on inductive FSL tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches.

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Code: https://github.com/Frankluox/LightningFSL