# TART: Improved Few-shot Text Classification Using Task-Adaptive Reference Transformation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02175 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02175/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [Ups and Downs: Modeling the Visual Evolution of Fashion Trends with One-Class Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01585/) (2016)
- [Meta-Learning with Latent Embedding Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05960/) (2018)
- [FastText.zip: Compressing text classification models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03651/) (2016)
- [Few-Shot Learning with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04043/) (2017)
- [How to train your MAML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09502/) (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)
- [Induction Networks for Few-Shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10482/) (2019)
- [Diverse Few-Shot Text Classification with Multiple Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07513/) (2018)
- [Few-shot Text Classification with Distributional Signatures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06039/) (2019)
- [News Category Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11429/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Memory Induction Networks for Few-Shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05727/) (2020)
- [ProtAugment: Unsupervised diverse short-texts paraphrasing for intent detection meta-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12995/) (2021)
- [Meta-Learning Adversarial Domain Adaptation Network for Few-Shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12262/) (2021)
- [ContrastNet: A Contrastive Learning Framework for Few-Shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09269/) (2023)

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

- [Mitigating Boundary Ambiguity and Inherent Bias for Text Classification in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07001/) (2024)
- [GORAG: Graph-based Online Retrieval Augmented Generation for Dynamic Few-shot Social Media Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02844/) (2025)
- [Improve Meta-learning for Few-Shot Text Classification with All You Can Acquire from the Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10454/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Meta-learning has emerged as a trending technique to tackle few-shot text classification and achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, the performance of existing approaches heavily depends on the inter-class variance of the support set. As a result, it can perform well on tasks when the semantics of sampled classes are distinct while failing to differentiate classes with similar semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel Task-Adaptive Reference Transformation (TART) network, aiming to enhance the generalization by transforming the class prototypes to per-class fixed reference points in task-adaptive metric spaces. To further maximize divergence between transformed prototypes in task-adaptive metric spaces, TART introduces a discriminative reference regularization among transformed prototypes. Extensive experiments are conducted on four benchmark datasets and our method demonstrates clear superiority over the state-of-the-art models in all the datasets. In particular, our model surpasses the state-of-the-art method by 7.4% and 5.4% in 1-shot and 5-shot classification on the 20 Newsgroups dataset, respectively.