# Hybrid Graph Neural Networks for Few-Shot Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.06538 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06538/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [On First-Order Meta-Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02999/) (2018)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [A Closer Look at Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04232/) (2019)
- [Meta-Learning with Implicit Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04630/) (2019)
- [Meta-Learning with Differentiable Convex Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03758/) (2019)
- [Meta-Learning for Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00676/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Rapid Learning or Feature Reuse? Towards Understanding the Effectiveness of MAML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09157/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Learning with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04043/) (2017)
- [Meta-Transfer Learning for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02391/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Learning via Embedding Adaptation with Set-to-Set Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03664/) (2018)
- [Meta Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00837/) (2017)
- [Learning to Propagate Labels: Transductive Propagation Network for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10002/) (2018)
- [Negative Margin Matters: Understanding Margin in Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12060/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Local Descriptor based Image-to-Class Measure for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12290/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Classification with Feature Map Reconstruction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01506/) (2020)
- [Edge-labeling Graph Neural Network for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01436/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [A Survey on Graph Neural Networks and Graph Transformers in Computer Vision: A Task-Oriented Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13232/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Data-Efficient Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00447/) (2024)
- [Task-Equivariant Graph Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18758/) (2023)
- [RankDNN: Learning to Rank for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15320/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Graph Out-of-Distribution Detection with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22097/) (2025)
- [Self-Attention Message Passing for Contrastive Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06339/) (2022)
- [Graph Learning and Its Advancements on Large Language Models: A Holistic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08966/) (2022)
- [Few-shot Classification via Ensemble Learning with Multi-Order Statistics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00454/) (2023)
- [Covariance-based Space Regularization for Few-shot Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01172/) (2024)
- [Disentangled Generation with Information Bottleneck for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16185/) (2022)
- [Dual-View Data Hallucination with Semantic Relation Guidance for Few-Shot Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07061/) (2024)
- [On Distilling the Displacement Knowledge for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11017/) (2024)
- [Rethinking the Sample Relations for Few-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13418/) (2025)
- [Instance Relation Learning Network with Label Knowledge Propagation for Few-shot Multi-label Intent Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07776/) (2025)
- [BAED: a New Paradigm for Few-shot Graph Learning with Explanation in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01941/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been used to tackle the few-shot learning (FSL) problem and shown great potentials under the transductive setting. However under the inductive setting, existing GNN based methods are less competitive. This is because they use an instance GNN as a label propagation/classification module, which is jointly meta-learned with a feature embedding network. This design is problematic because the classifier needs to adapt quickly to new tasks while the embedding does not. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a novel hybrid GNN (HGNN) model consisting of two GNNs, an instance GNN and a prototype GNN. Instead of label propagation, they act as feature embedding adaptation modules for quick adaptation of the meta-learned feature embedding to new tasks. Importantly they are designed to deal with a fundamental yet often neglected challenge in FSL, that is, with only a handful of shots per class, any few-shot classifier would be sensitive to badly sampled shots which are either outliers or can cause inter-class distribution overlapping. %Our two GNNs are designed to address these two types of poorly sampled few-shots respectively and their complementarity is exploited in the hybrid GNN model. Extensive experiments show that our HGNN obtains new state-of-the-art on three FSL benchmarks.