MahiNet: A Neural Network for Many-Class Few-Shot Learning with Class Hierarchy

Lu Liu, Tianyi Zhou, Guodong Long, Jing Jiang, Chengqi Zhang

Abstract: We study many-class few-shot (MCFS) problem in both supervised learning and meta-learning scenarios. Compared to the well-studied many-class many-shot and few-class few-shot problems, MCFS problem commonly occurs in practical applications but is rarely studied. MCFS brings new challenges because it needs to distinguish between many classes, but only a few samples per class are available for training. In this paper, we propose ``memory-augmented hierarchical-classification network (MahiNet)'' for MCFS learning. It addresses the ``many-class'' problem by exploring the class hierarchy, e.g., the coarse-class label that covers a subset of fine classes, which helps to narrow down the candidates for the fine class and is cheaper to obtain. MahiNet uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract features, and integrates a memory-augmented attention module with a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to produce the probabilities over coarse and fine classes. While the MLP extends the linear classifier, the attention module extends a KNN classifier, both together targeting the ''`few-shot'' problem. We design different training strategies of MahiNet for supervised learning and meta-learning. Moreover, we propose two novel benchmark datasets ''mcfsImageNet'' (as a subset of ImageNet) and ''mcfsOmniglot'' (re-splitted Omniglot) specifically for MCFS problem. In experiments, we show that MahiNet outperforms several state-of-the-art models on MCFS classification tasks in both supervised learning and meta-learning scenarios.

Keywords: deep learning, many-class few-shot, class hierarchy, meta learning

TL;DR: A memory-augmented neural network that addresses many-class few-shot problem by leveraging class hierarchy in both supervised learning and meta-learning.

Data: [ImageNet](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/imagenet)