# One Representation to Rule Them All: Identifying Out-of-Support Examples in Few-shot Learning with Generic Representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01423 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01423/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [On First-Order Meta-Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02999/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04232/) (2019)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [Generalizing from a Few Examples: A Survey on Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05046/) (2019)
- [Training Confidence-calibrated Classifiers for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09325/) (2017)
- [Fruit recognition from images using deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00580/) (2017)
- [Few-shot Image Classification: Just Use a Library of Pre-trained Feature Extractors and a Simple Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00562/) (2021)
- [Universum Prescription: Regularization using Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03719/) (2015)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The field of few-shot learning has made remarkable strides in developing powerful models that can operate in the small data regime. Nearly all of these methods assume every unlabeled instance encountered will belong to a handful of known classes for which one has examples. This can be problematic for real-world use cases where one routinely finds 'none-of-the-above' examples. In this paper we describe this challenge of identifying what we term 'out-of-support' (OOS) examples. We describe how this problem is subtly different from out-of-distribution detection and describe a new method of identifying OOS examples within the Prototypical Networks framework using a fixed point which we call the generic representation. We show that our method outperforms other existing approaches in the literature as well as other approaches that we propose in this paper. Finally, we investigate how the use of such a generic point affects the geometry of a model's feature space.