Continual Local Replacement for Few-shot Learning

The goal of few-shot learning is to learn a model that can recognize novel classes based on one or few training data. It is challenging mainly due to two aspects: (1) it lacks good feature representation of novel classes; (2) a few of labeled data could not accurately represent the true data distribution and thus it's hard to learn a good decision function for classification. In this work, we use a sophisticated network architecture to learn better feature representation and focus on the second issue. A novel continual local replacement strategy is proposed to address the data deficiency problem. It takes advantage of the content in unlabeled images to continually enhance labeled ones. Specifically, a pseudo labeling method is adopted to constantly select semantically similar images on the fly. Original labeled images will be locally replaced by the selected images for the next epoch training. In this way, the model can directly learn new semantic information from unlabeled images and the capacity of supervised signals in the embedding space can be significantly enlarged. This allows the model to improve generalization and learn a better decision boundary for classification. Our method is conceptually simple and easy to implement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that it can achieve state-of-the-art results on various few-shot image recognition benchmarks.