# Better Generalized Few-Shot Learning Even Without Base Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.16095 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16095/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (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)
- [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)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [A Closer Look at Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04232/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Learning -- A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00600/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Maintaining Discrimination and Fairness in Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07053/) (2019)
- [Frustratingly Simple Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06957/) (2020)
- [DropBlock: A regularization method for convolutional networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12890/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10956/) (2020)
- [Generalized Zero- and Few-Shot Learning via Aligned Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01784/) (2018)
- [SimpleShot: Revisiting Nearest-Neighbor Classification for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04623/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Incremental Learning with Continually Evolved Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03047/) (2021)
- [Low-Shot Learning from Imaginary Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05401/) (2018)
- [Meta-Baseline: Exploring Simple Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04390/) (2020)
- [Task-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07722/) (2018)
- [Generalized Few-Shot Object Detection without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09491/) (2021)
- [Boosting Few-Shot Learning With Adaptive Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13826/) (2020)
- [Generating Classification Weights with GNN Denoising Autoencoders for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01102/) (2019)
- [Incremental Few-Shot Learning with Attention Attractor Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07218/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Instance-based Max-margin for Practical Few-shot Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17368/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Generalized Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation via Effective Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15835/) (2024)
- [Text-to-feature diffusion for audio-visual few-shot learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03869/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces and studies zero-base generalized few-shot learning (zero-base GFSL), which is an extreme yet practical version of few-shot learning problem. Motivated by the cases where base data is not available due to privacy or ethical issues, the goal of zero-base GFSL is to newly incorporate the knowledge of few samples of novel classes into a pretrained model without any samples of base classes. According to our analysis, we discover the fact that both mean and variance of the weight distribution of novel classes are not properly established, compared to those of base classes. The existing GFSL methods attempt to make the weight norms balanced, which we find helps only the variance part, but discard the importance of mean of weights particularly for novel classes, leading to the limited performance in the GFSL problem even with base data. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by proposing a simple yet effective normalization method that can effectively control both mean and variance of the weight distribution of novel classes without using any base samples and thereby achieve a satisfactory performance on both novel and base classes. Our experimental results somewhat surprisingly show that the proposed zero-base GFSL method that does not utilize any base samples even outperforms the existing GFSL methods that make the best use of base data. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/bigdata-inha/Zero-Base-GFSL.