Meta-Learned Confidence for Transductive Few-shot Learning

Seong Min Kye, Hae Beom Lee, Hoirin Kim, Sung Ju Hwang

Keywords: Meta-learning, Few-shot learning, Transductive learning, Semi-supervised learning

Abstract: Transductive inference is an effective means of tackling the data deficiency problem in few-shot learning settings. A popular transductive inference technique for few-shot metric-based approaches, is to update the prototype of each class with the mean of the most confident query examples, or confidence-weighted average of all the query samples. However, a caveat here is that the model confidence may be unreliable, which may lead to incorrect predictions. To tackle this issue, we propose to meta-learn the confidence for each query sample, to assign optimal weights to unlabeled queries such that they improve the model’s transductive inference performance on unseen tasks. We achieve this by meta-learning an input-adaptive distance metric over a task distribution under various model and data perturbations, which will enforce consistency on the model predictions under diverse uncertainties for unseen tasks. We validate our few-shot learning model with meta-learned confidence on four benchmark datasets, on which it largely outperforms strong recent baselines and obtains new state-of-the-art results. Further application on semi-supervised few shot learning tasks also yields significant performance improvements over the baselines.

One-sentence Summary: This paper focuses on the meta-learning for transductive and semi-supervised learning.

Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics

Reviewed Version (pdf): https://openreview.net/references/pdf?id=rfnQn-q-c3