Interventional Feature Generation for Few-shot Learning

Shuo Wang, Jinda Lu, Huixia Ben, Yanbin Hao, Xingyu Gao, Meng Wang

Abstract: Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to classify a novel object into a specific category under limited training samples. This is a challenging task since (1) the features expressed by pre-trained knowledge introduce perceived bias and then constrain the classification space, and (2) the use of general hallucination techniques based on global features fails to escape the limited classification space, resulting in sub-optimal improvements. To solve these issues, this article proposes an interventional feature generation (IFG) method. Specifically, we first use the relations of the categories or instances as interventional operations to implicitly constrain the feature representations (pre-trained knowledge) into different classification subsets. Then, we employ a parameter-free feature generation strategy to enrich each subset’s training samples of the support category. In other words, IFG provides a multi-subsets learning strategy to reduce the influence of perceived bias, enrich the diversity of generated features, and improve the robustness of the few-shot classifier. We apply our method to four benchmark datasets and observe state-of-the-art performance across all experiments. Specifically, compared to the baseline on the Mini-ImageNet dataset, our approach yields accuracy improvements of 6.03% and 3.46% for 1 and 5 support training samples, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed interventional feature generation technique can improve classifier performance in other FSL methods, demonstrating its versatility and potential for broader applications. The code is available at https://github.com/ShuoWangCS/IFG-FSL/.

External IDs:dblp:journals/tomccap/WangLBHGW25