# Revisiting Distance Metric Learning for Few-Shot Natural Language Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15202/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [Regularizing Neural Networks by Penalizing Confident Output Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06548/) (2017)
- [Keystroke Dynamics as Part of Lifelogging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10144/) (2020)
- [A Metric Learning Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08505/) (2020)
- [SentEval: An Evaluation Toolkit for Universal Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05449/) (2018)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning for Pre-trained Language Model Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01403/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Few-sample BERT Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05987/) (2020)
- [No Fuss Distance Metric Learning using Proxies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07464/) (2017)
- [Proxy Anchor Loss for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13911/) (2020)
- [SoftTriple Loss: Deep Metric Learning Without Triplet Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05235/) (2019)
- [Diversity with Cooperation: Ensemble Methods for Few-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11341/) (2019)
- [Learning to Few-Shot Learn Across Diverse Natural Language Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03863/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Distance Metric Learning (DML) has attracted much attention in image processing in recent years. This paper analyzes its impact on supervised fine-tuning language models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) classification tasks under few-shot learning settings. We investigated several DML loss functions in training RoBERTa language models on known SentEval Transfer Tasks datasets. We also analyzed the possibility of using proxy-based DML losses during model inference. Our systematic experiments have shown that under few-shot learning settings, particularly proxy-based DML losses can positively affect the fine-tuning and inference of a supervised language model. Models tuned with a combination of CCE (categorical cross-entropy loss) and ProxyAnchor Loss have, on average, the best performance and outperform models with only CCE by about 3.27 percentage points -- up to 10.38 percentage points depending on the training dataset.