Coarse-to-fine few-shot classification with deep metric learning

Enhancing few-shot image classification through learnable multi-scale embedding and attention mechanisms

In the context of few-shot classification, the goal is to train a classifier using a limited number of samples while maintaining satisfactory performance. However, traditional metric-based methods exhibit certain limitations in achieving this objective. These methods typically rely on a single distance value between the query feature and support feature, thereby overlooking the contribution of shallow features. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel approach in this paper. Our approach involves utilizing a multi-output embedding network that maps samples into distinct feature spaces. The proposed method extracts feature vectors at different stages, enabling the model to capture both global and abstract features. By utilizing these diverse feature spaces, our model enhances its performance. Moreover, employing a self-attention mechanism improves the refinement of features at each stage, leading to even more robust representations and improved overall performance. Furthermore, assigning learnable weights to each stage significantly improved performance and results. We conducted comprehensive evaluations on the MiniImageNet and FC100 datasets, specifically in the 5-way 1-shot and 5-way 5-shot scenarios. Additionally, we performed cross-domain tasks across eight benchmark datasets, achieving high accuracy in the testing domains. These evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches. https://github.com/FatemehAskari/MSENet.

Few-shot learning based on deep learning: A survey

In recent years, with the development of science and technology, powerful computing devices have been constantly developing. As an important foundation, deep learning (DL) technology has achieved many successes in multiple fields. In addition, the success of deep learning also relies on the support of large-scale datasets, which can provide models with a variety of images. The rich information in these images can help the model learn more about various categories of images, thereby improving the classification performance and generalization ability of the model. However, in real application scenarios, it may be difficult for most tasks to collect a large number of images or enough images for model training, which also restricts the performance of the trained model to a certain extent. Therefore, how to use limited samples to train the model with high performance becomes key. In order to improve this problem, the few-shot learning (FSL) strategy is proposed, which aims to obtain a model with strong performance through a small amount of data. Therefore, FSL can play its advantages in some real scene tasks where a large number of training data cannot be obtained. In this review, we will mainly introduce the FSL methods for image classification based on DL, which are mainly divided into four categories: methods based on data enhancement, metric learning, meta-learning and adding other tasks. First, we introduce some classic and advanced FSL methods in the order of categories. Second, we introduce some datasets that are often used to test the performance of FSL methods and the performance of some classical and advanced FSL methods on two common datasets. Finally, we discuss the current challenges and future prospects in this field.