# Few-shot Learning with Global Relatedness Decoupled-Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.05583 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05583/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Neural Turing Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.5401/) (2014)
- [Generalizing from a Few Examples: A Survey on Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05046/) (2019)
- [Meta-Learning with Differentiable Convex Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03758/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Few-Shot Image Classification: a Good Embedding Is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11539/) (2020)
- [TADAM: Task dependent adaptive metric for improved few-shot learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10123/) (2018)
- [Meta-learning with differentiable closed-form solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08136/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Few-Shot Visual Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09458/) (2018)
- [Meta-Transfer Learning for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02391/) (2018)
- [A Baseline for Few-Shot Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02729/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Learning via Embedding Adaptation with Set-to-Set Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03664/) (2018)
- [Learning to Propagate Labels: Transductive Propagation Network for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10002/) (2018)
- [Generalized Zero- and Few-Shot Learning via Aligned Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01784/) (2018)
- [Low-Shot Learning from Imaginary Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05401/) (2018)
- [Free Lunch for Few-shot Learning: Distribution Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06395/) (2021)
- [Task-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07722/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Image Recognition by Predicting Parameters from Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03466/) (2017)
- [Interventional Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13000/) (2020)
- [Prototype Rectification for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10713/) (2019)
- [Laplacian Regularized Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15486/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the success that metric learning based approaches have achieved in few-shot learning, recent works reveal the ineffectiveness of their episodic training mode. In this paper, we point out two potential reasons for this problem: 1) the random episodic labels can only provide limited supervision information, while the relatedness information between the query and support samples is not fully exploited; 2) the meta-learner is usually constrained by the limited contextual information of the local episode. To overcome these problems, we propose a new Global Relatedness Decoupled-Distillation (GRDD) method using the global category knowledge and the Relatedness Decoupled-Distillation (RDD) strategy. Our GRDD learns new visual concepts quickly by imitating the habit of humans, i.e. learning from the deep knowledge distilled from the teacher. More specifically, we first train a global learner on the entire base subset using category labels as supervision to leverage the global context information of the categories. Then, the well-trained global learner is used to simulate the query-support relatedness in global dependencies. Finally, the distilled global query-support relatedness is explicitly used to train the meta-learner using the RDD strategy, with the goal of making the meta-learner more discriminative. The RDD strategy aims to decouple the dense query-support relatedness into the groups of sparse decoupled relatedness. Moreover, only the relatedness of a single support sample with other query samples is considered in each group. By distilling the sparse decoupled relatedness group by group, sharper relatedness can be effectively distilled to the meta-learner, thereby facilitating the learning of a discriminative meta-learner. We conduct extensive experiments on the miniImagenet and CIFAR-FS datasets, which show the state-of-the-art performance of our GRDD method.