Few-shot Learning for Multi-Modality Tasks

Jie Chen, Qixiang Ye, Xiaoshan Yang, S. Kevin Zhou, Xiaopeng Hong, Li Zhang

Abstract: Recent deep learning methods rely on a large amount of labeled data to achieve high performance. These methods may be impractical in some scenarios, where manual data annotation is costly or the samples of certain categories are scarce (e.g., tumor lesions, endangered animals and rare individual activities). When only limited annotated samples are available, these methods usually suffer from the overfitting problem severely, which degrades the performance significantly. In contrast, humans can recognize the objects in the images rapidly and correctly with their prior knowledge after exposed to only a few annotated samples. To simulate the learning schema of humans and relieve the reliance on the large-scale annotation benchmarks, researchers start shifting towards the few-shot learning problem: they try to learn a model to correctly recognize novel categories with only a few annotated samples.