Learning Stable Task-Level Manifold for Few-Shot Learning

Siyi Yu, Wei Luo, Gang Li, Bo Yang

Abstract: Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to learn to new concepts based on very limited data. One of the main challenges in FSL is the use of pretrained embeddings whose dimension is too high for the small sample size. While the large dimensionality helps capture diverse features in the training example, not all the features are relevant to the task at hand. Such task-irrelevant features from pre-trained embeddings can negatively impact the performance of the FSL model. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective way to learn task-level manifolds that explicitly eliminate the negative effect of nuisance features. One key novelty of our approach is to address class imbalance in the training data by injecting supervised information through key virtual samples, which we named Manifold Support Points. Empirically, we demonstrate that the stability of the learnt task-level manifolds and their effectiveness in challenging tasks in FSL. Our approach shows competitive performance on several benchmark datasets, including tieredImageNet and CUB.