In this paper, we explore contrastive learning for few-shot classification, in which we propose to use it as an additional auxiliary training objective acting as a data-dependent regularizer to promote more general and transferable features. In particular, we present a novel attention-based spatial contrastive objective to learn locally discriminative and class-agnostic features. As a result, our approach overcomes some of the limitations of the cross-entropy loss, such as its excessive discrimination towards seen classes, which reduces the transferability of features to unseen classes. With extensive experiments, we show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, confirming the importance of learning good and transferable embeddings for few-shot learning.
Amazon Web Services（亚马逊云科技）；UMass Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
Few-shot learning aims to transfer information from one task to enable generalization on novel tasks given a few examples. This information is present both in the domain and the class labels. In this work we investigate the complementary roles of these two sources of information by combining instance-discriminative contrastive learning and supervised learning in a single framework called Supervised Momentum Contrastive learning (SUPMOCO). Our approach avoids a problem observed in supervised learning where information in images not relevant to the task is discarded, which hampers their generali…
Contrastive self-supervised learning methods learn to map data points such as images into non-parametric representation space without requiring labels. While highly successful, current methods require a large amount of data in the training phase. In situations where the target training set is limited in size, generalization is known to be poor. Pretraining on a large source data set and fine-tuning on the target samples is prone to overfitting in the few-shot regime, where only a small number of target samples are available. Motivated by this, we propose a domain adaption method for self-super…
Multi-level Cross-modal Feature Alignment via Contrastive Learning towards Zero-shot Classification of Remote Sensing Image Scenes
Henan Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis and Processing（河南省大数据分析与处理重点实验室）；Henan Engineering Laboratory of Spatial Information Processing（河南省空间信息处理工程实验室）；Henan Industrial Technology Academy of Spatio-Temporal Big Data, Henan University（河南大学河南时空大数据产业技术研究院）
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Adobe Research（Adobe 研究院）
In this work, we focus on a more challenging few-shot intent detection scenario where many intents are fine-grained and semantically similar. We present a simple yet effective few-shot intent detection schema via contrastive pre-training and fine-tuning. Specifically, we first conduct self-supervised contrastive pre-training on collected intent datasets, which implicitly learns to discriminate semantically similar utterances without using any labels. We then perform few-shot intent detection together with supervised contrastive learning, which explicitly pulls utterances from the same intent c…
Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH)（浦项科技大学）
Zero-shot slot filling has received considerable attention to cope with the problem of limited available data for the target domain. One of the important factors in zero-shot learning is to make the model learn generalized and reliable representations. For this purpose, we present mcBERT, which stands for momentum contrastive learning with BERT, to develop a robust zero-shot slot filling model. mcBERT uses BERT to initialize the two encoders, the query encoder and key encoder, and is trained by applying momentum contrastive learning. Our experimental results on the SNIPS benchmark show that mc…
Humans are capable of learning new concepts from only a few (labeled) exemplars, incrementally and continually. This happens within the context that we can differentiate among the exemplars, and between the exemplars and large amounts of other data (unlabeled and labeled). This suggests, in human learning, supervised learning of concepts based on exemplars takes place within the larger context of contrastive self-supervised learning (CSSL) based on unlabeled and labeled data. We discuss extending CSSL (1) to be based mainly on exemplars and only secondly on data augmentation, and (2) to apply …
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Bytedance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）
Graphs are present in many real-world applications, such as financial fraud detection, commercial recommendation, and social network analysis. But given the high cost of graph annotation or labeling, we face a severe graph label-scarcity problem, i.e., a graph might have a few labeled nodes. One example of such a problem is the so-called \textit{few-shot node classification}. A predominant approach to this problem resorts to \textit{episodic meta-learning}. In this work, we challenge the status quo by asking a fundamental question whether meta-learning is a must for few-shot node classificatio…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
In this paper, we explore how to utilize pre-trained language model to perform few-shot text classification where only a few annotated examples are given for each class. Since using traditional cross-entropy loss to fine-tune language model under this scenario causes serious overfitting and leads to sub-optimal generalization of model, we adopt supervised contrastive learning on few labeled data and consistency-regularization on vast unlabeled data. Moreover, we propose a novel contrastive consistency to further boost model performance and refine sentence representation. After conducting exten…
Neural network based speech recognition systems suffer from performance degradation due to accented speech, especially unfamiliar accents. In this paper, we study the supervised contrastive learning framework for accented speech recognition. To build different views (similar "positive" data samples) for contrastive learning, three data augmentation techniques including noise injection, spectrogram augmentation and TTS-same-sentence generation are further investigated. From the experiments on the Common Voice dataset, we have shown that contrastive learning helps to build data-augmentation inva…
University of Agder（阿格德大学）；Institute of Marine Research（海洋研究所）
In both terrestrial and marine ecology, physical tagging is a frequently used method to study population dynamics and behavior. However, such tagging techniques are increasingly being replaced by individual re-identification using image analysis. This paper introduces a contrastive learning-based model for identifying individuals. The model uses the first parts of the Inception v3 network, supported by a projection head, and we use contrastive learning to find similar or dissimilar image pairs from a collection of uniform photographs. We apply this technique for corkwing wrasse, Symphodus melo…
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Standard few-shot relation classification (RC) is designed to learn a robust classifier with only few labeled data for each class. However, previous works rarely investigate the effects of a different number of classes (i.e., $N$-way) and number of labeled data per class (i.e., $K$-shot) during training vs. testing. In this work, we define a new task, \textit{inconsistent few-shot RC}, where the model needs to handle the inconsistency of $N$ and $K$ between training and testing. To address this new task, we propose Prototype Network-based cross-attention contrastive learning (ProtoCACL) to cap…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；LG AI Research（LG人工智能研究院）
Unsupervised meta-learning aims to learn generalizable knowledge across a distribution of tasks constructed from unlabeled data. Here, the main challenge is how to construct diverse tasks for meta-learning without label information; recent works have proposed to create, e.g., pseudo-labeling via pretrained representations or creating synthetic samples via generative models. However, such a task construction strategy is fundamentally limited due to heavy reliance on the immutable pseudo-labels during meta-learning and the quality of the representations or the generated samples. To overcome the …
MCLRL: A Multi-Domain Contrastive Learning with Reinforcement Learning Framework for Few-Shot Modulation Recognition
Institute of Cyberspace Security, College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学信息工程学院网络空间安全研究所）；Binjiang Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学滨江人工智能研究院）；College of Information and Communication Engineering, Harbin Engineering University（哈尔滨工程大学信息与通信工程学院）
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（Inception人工智能研究院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
The current pandemic, caused by the outbreak of a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in December 2019, has led to a global emergency that has significantly impacted economies, healthcare systems and personal wellbeing all around the world. Controlling the rapidly evolving disease requires highly sensitive and specific diagnostics. While real-time RT-PCR is the most commonly used, these can take up to 8 hours, and require significant effort from healthcare professionals. As such, there is a critical need for a quick and automatic diagnostic system. Diagnosis from chest CT images is a promising direct…
Microsoft Research at Redmond（微软雷德蒙德研究院）；Microsoft Cloud + AI（微软云计算与人工智能部门）
Visual recognition is recently learned via either supervised learning on human-annotated image-label data or language-image contrastive learning with webly-crawled image-text pairs. While supervised learning may result in a more discriminative representation, language-image pretraining shows unprecedented zero-shot recognition capability, largely due to the different properties of data sources and learning objectives. In this work, we introduce a new formulation by combining the two data sources into a common image-text-label space. In this space, we propose a new learning paradigm, called Uni…
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Shell Global Solutions International B.V.（壳牌全球解决方案国际有限公司）
Unsupervised learning is argued to be the dark matter of human intelligence. To build in this direction, this paper focuses on unsupervised learning from an abundance of unlabeled data followed by few-shot fine-tuning on a downstream classification task. To this aim, we extend a recent study on adopting contrastive learning for self-supervised pre-training by incorporating class-level cognizance through iterative clustering and re-ranking and by expanding the contrastive optimization loss to account for it. To our knowledge, our experimentation both in standard and cross-domain scenarios demon…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Multi-label aspect category detection allows a given review sentence to contain multiple aspect categories, which is shown to be more practical in sentiment analysis and attracting increasing attention. As annotating large amounts of data is time-consuming and labor-intensive, data scarcity occurs frequently in real-world scenarios, which motivates multi-label few-shot aspect category detection. However, research on this problem is still in infancy and few methods are available. In this paper, we propose a novel label-enhanced prototypical network (LPN) for multi-label few-shot aspect category…
Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology（三星先进技术研究院）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
While humans can solve a visual puzzle that requires logical reasoning by observing only few samples, it would require training over large amount of data for state-of-the-art deep reasoning models to obtain similar performance on the same task. In this work, we propose to solve such a few-shot (or low-shot) visual reasoning problem, by resorting to analogical reasoning, which is a unique human ability to identify structural or relational similarity between two sets. Specifically, given training and test sets that contain the same type of visual reasoning problems, we extract the structural rel…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
We propose Few-Example Clustering (FEC), a novel algorithm that performs contrastive learning to cluster few examples. Our method is composed of the following three steps: (1) generation of candidate cluster assignments, (2) contrastive learning for each cluster assignment, and (3) selection of the best candidate. Based on the hypothesis that the contrastive learner with the ground-truth cluster assignment is trained faster than the others, we choose the candidate with the smallest training loss in the early stage of learning in step (3). Extensive experiments on the \textit{mini}-ImageNet and…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）
We explore an efficient approach to establish a foundational video-text model. We present VideoCoCa that maximally reuses a pretrained image-text contrastive captioner (CoCa) model and adapt it to video-text tasks with minimal extra training. While previous works adapt image-text models with various cross-frame fusion modules, we find that the generative attentional pooling and contrastive attentional pooling layers in CoCa are instantly adaptable to flattened frame embeddings, yielding state-of-the-art results on zero-shot video classification and zero-shot text-to-video retrieval. Furthermor…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；MEGVII Technology（旷视科技）
Emerging interests have been brought to recognize previously unseen objects given very few training examples, known as few-shot object detection (FSOD). Recent researches demonstrate that good feature embedding is the key to reach favorable few-shot learning performance. We observe object proposals with different Intersection-of-Union (IoU) scores are analogous to the intra-image augmentation used in contrastive approaches. And we exploit this analogy and incorporate supervised contrastive learning to achieve more robust objects representations in FSOD. We present Few-Shot object detection via…
The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences（埃德蒙和莉莉·萨夫拉脑科学中心）
Video prediction models often combine three components: an encoder from pixel space to a small latent space, a latent space prediction model, and a generative model back to pixel space. However, the large and unpredictable pixel space makes training such models difficult, requiring many training examples. We argue that finding a predictive latent variable and using it to evaluate the consistency of a future image enables data-efficient predictions because it precludes the necessity of a generative model training. To demonstrate it, we created sequence completion intelligence tests in which the…
Contrastive learning is a discriminative approach that aims at grouping similar samples closer and diverse samples far from each other. It it an efficient technique to train an encoder generating distinguishable and informative representations, and it may even increase the encoder's transferability. Most current applications of contrastive learning benefit only a single representation from the last layer of an encoder.In this paper, we propose a multi-level contrasitive learning approach which applies contrastive losses at different layers of an encoder to learn multiple representations from t…
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
A two-stage training paradigm consisting of sequential pre-training and meta-training stages has been widely used in current few-shot learning (FSL) research. Many of these methods use self-supervised learning and contrastive learning to achieve new state-of-the-art results. However, the potential of contrastive learning in both stages of FSL training paradigm is still not fully exploited. In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive learning-based framework that seamlessly integrates contrastive learning into both stages to improve the performance of few-shot classification. In the pre-train…
In this paper, we propose the $K$-Shot Contrastive Learning (KSCL) of visual features by applying multiple augmentations to investigate the sample variations within individual instances. It aims to combine the advantages of inter-instance discrimination by learning discriminative features to distinguish between different instances, as well as intra-instance variations by matching queries against the variants of augmented samples over instances. Particularly, for each instance, it constructs an instance subspace to model the configuration of how the significant factors of variations in $K$-shot…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Pengcheng Lab（鹏城实验室）
The goal of few-shot classification is to classify new categories with few labeled examples within each class. Nowadays, the excellent performance in handling few-shot classification problems is shown by metric-based meta-learning methods. However, it is very hard for previous methods to discriminate the fine-grained sub-categories in the embedding space without fine-grained labels. This may lead to unsatisfactory generalization to fine-grained subcategories, and thus affects model interpretation. To tackle this problem, we introduce the contrastive loss into few-shot classification for learni…
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to classify and detect few images of novel categories. Existing meta-learning methods insufficiently exploit features between support and query images owing to structural limitations. We propose a hierarchical attention network with sequentially large receptive fields to fully exploit the query and support images. In addition, meta-learning does not distinguish the categories well because it determines whether the support and query images match. In other words, metric-based learning for classification is ineffective because it does not work directly. Thus,…
A Contrastive Learning-Guided Confident Meta-learning for Zero Shot Anomaly Detection
Dept. of Engineering for Innovation Medicine, University of Verona（创新医学工程系，威尼斯大学）；Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana（计算机与信息科学系，卢布尔雅那大学）；Qualyco S.r.l.（Qualyco公司）
School of Information；Communications Xi’an Jiaotong University Xi'an, P.R. China
Most previous few-shot learning algorithms are based on meta-training with fake few-shot tasks as training samples, where large labeled base classes are required. The trained model is also limited by the type of tasks. In this paper we propose a new paradigm of unsupervised few-shot learning to repair the deficiencies. We solve the few-shot tasks in two phases: meta-training a transferable feature extractor via contrastive self-supervised learning and training a classifier using graph aggregation, self-distillation and manifold augmentation. Once meta-trained, the model can be used in any type…
Scenes play a crucial role in breaking the storyline of movies and TV episodes into semantically cohesive parts. However, given their complex temporal structure, finding scene boundaries can be a challenging task requiring large amounts of labeled training data. To address this challenge, we present a self-supervised shot contrastive learning approach (ShotCoL) to learn a shot representation that maximizes the similarity between nearby shots compared to randomly selected shots. We show how to apply our learned shot representation for the task of scene boundary detection to offer state-of-the-a…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）
3D reconstruction of novel categories based on few-shot learning is appealing in real-world applications and attracts increasing research interests. Previous approaches mainly focus on how to design shape prior models for different categories. Their performance on unseen categories is not very competitive. In this paper, we present a Memory Prior Contrastive Network (MPCN) that can store shape prior knowledge in a few-shot learning based 3D reconstruction framework. With the shape memory, a multi-head attention module is proposed to capture different parts of a candidate shape prior and fuse t…
A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Jiangxi Finance and Economics University（江西财经大学）
Current methods for few-shot segmentation (FSSeg) have mainly focused on improving the performance of novel classes while neglecting the performance of base classes. To overcome this limitation, the task of generalized few-shot semantic segmentation (GFSSeg) has been introduced, aiming to predict segmentation masks for both base and novel classes. However, the current prototype-based methods do not explicitly consider the relationship between base and novel classes when updating prototypes, leading to a limited performance in identifying true categories. To address this challenge, we propose a…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is a challenging problem that aims to recognize the target categories without seen data, where semantic information is leveraged to transfer knowledge from some source classes. Although ZSL has made great progress in recent years, most existing approaches are easy to overfit the sources classes in generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) task, which indicates that they learn little knowledge about target classes. To tackle such problem, we propose a novel Transferable Contrastive Network (TCN) that explicitly transfers knowledge from the source classes to the target class…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局制造技术研究所）
This paper presents an effective few-shot point cloud semantic segmentation approach for real-world applications. Existing few-shot segmentation methods on point cloud heavily rely on the fully-supervised pretrain with large annotated datasets, which causes the learned feature extraction bias to those pretrained classes. However, as the purpose of few-shot learning is to handle unknown/unseen classes, such class-specific feature extraction in pretrain is not ideal to generalize into new classes for few-shot learning. Moreover, point cloud datasets hardly have a large number of classes due to t…
We present VideoCLIP, a contrastive approach to pre-train a unified model for zero-shot video and text understanding, without using any labels on downstream tasks. VideoCLIP trains a transformer for video and text by contrasting temporally overlapping positive video-text pairs with hard negatives from nearest neighbor retrieval. Our experiments on a diverse series of downstream tasks, including sequence-level text-video retrieval, VideoQA, token-level action localization, and action segmentation reveal state-of-the-art performance, surpassing prior work, and in some cases even outperforming su…
