In the field of few-shot learning (FSL), extensive research has focused on improving network structures and training strategies. However, the role of data processing modules has not been fully explored. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Meta-DM, a generalized data processing module for FSL problems based on diffusion models. Meta-DM is a simple yet effective module that can be easily integrated with existing FSL methods, leading to significant performance improvements in both supervised and unsupervised settings. We provide a theoretical analysis of Meta-DM and evaluate its performance on several algorithms. Our experiments show that combining Meta-DM with certain methods achieves state-of-the-art results.
Few-Shot Learning is the challenge of training a model with only a small amount of data. Many solutions to this problem use meta-learning algorithms, i.e. algorithms that learn to learn. By sampling few-shot tasks from a larger dataset, we can teach these algorithms to solve new, unseen tasks. This document reports my work on meta-learning algorithms for Few-Shot Computer Vision. This work was done during my internship at Sicara, a French company building image recognition solutions for businesses. It contains: 1. an extensive review of the state-of-the-art in few-shot computer vision; 2. a be…
Zero-Shot Video Restoration and Enhancement Using Pre-Trained Image Diffusion Model
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University（天津大学电气与信息工程学院）；School of Engineering Science, Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT（拉彭兰塔-拉赫蒂理工大学工程科学学院）
Recent studies on few-shot classification using transfer learning pose challenges to the effectiveness and efficiency of episodic meta-learning algorithms. Transfer learning approaches are a natural alternative, but they are restricted to few-shot classification. Moreover, little attention has been on the development of probabilistic models with well-calibrated uncertainty from few-shot samples, except for some Bayesian episodic learning algorithms. To tackle the aforementioned issues, we propose a new transfer learning method to obtain accurate and reliable models for few-shot regression and …
UC San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Penn State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
Meta-learning has been the most common framework for few-shot learning in recent years. It learns the model from collections of few-shot classification tasks, which is believed to have a key advantage of making the training objective consistent with the testing objective. However, some recent works report that by training for whole-classification, i.e. classification on the whole label-set, it can get comparable or even better embedding than many meta-learning algorithms. The edge between these two lines of works has yet been underexplored, and the effectiveness of meta-learning in few-shot le…
Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）；Norwegian Computing Center（挪威计算中心）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) are powerful hierarchical latent variable models with remarkable sample generation quality and training stability. These properties can be attributed to parameter sharing in the generative hierarchy, as well as a parameter-free diffusion-based inference procedure. In this paper, we present Few-Shot Diffusion Models (FSDM), a framework for few-shot generation leveraging conditional DDPMs. FSDMs are trained to adapt the generative process conditioned on a small set of images from a given class by aggregating image patch information using a set-base…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）；Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）
Real-world classification tasks are frequently required to work in an open-set setting. This is especially challenging for few-shot learning problems due to the small sample size for each known category, which prevents existing open-set methods from working effectively; however, most multiclass few-shot methods are limited to closed-set scenarios. In this work, we address the problem of few-shot open-set classification by first proposing methods for few-shot one-class classification and then extending them to few-shot multiclass open-set classification. We introduce two independent few-shot on…
Northwestern Polytechnical University of China（中国西北工业大学）；AIBEE；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Huawei Cloud（华为云）
Recently, meta-learning has been shown as a promising way to solve few-shot learning. In this paper, inspired by the human cognition process which utilizes both prior-knowledge and vision attention in learning new knowledge, we present a novel paradigm of meta-learning approach with three developments to introduce attention mechanism and prior-knowledge for meta-learning. In our approach, prior-knowledge is responsible for helping meta-learner expressing the input data into high-level representation space, and attention mechanism enables meta-learner focusing on key features of the data in the…
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Hyundai Motor Group（现代汽车集团）
In few-shot learning scenarios, the challenge is to generalize and perform well on new unseen examples when only very few labeled examples are available for each task. Model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) has gained the popularity as one of the representative few-shot learning methods for its flexibility and applicability to diverse problems. However, MAML and its variants often resort to a simple loss function without any auxiliary loss function or regularization terms that can help achieve better generalization. The problem lies in that each application and task may require different auxiliar…
Efficient Zero-Shot Inpainting with Decoupled Diffusion Guidance
CMAP, Ecole Polytechnique（高等理工学院CMAP）；Institute of Foundation Models（基础模型研究所）；MBZUAI（穆扎夫技术研究院）；EPITA；Sorbonne University（索邦大学）；Lagrange Mathematics and Computing Research Center（拉格朗日数学与计算研究中心）；EPITA Research Lab（EPITA研究实验室）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（皇家理工学院）
Conditional generative models of high-dimensional images have many applications, but supervision signals from conditions to images can be expensive to acquire. This paper describes Diffusion-Decoding models with Contrastive representations (D2C), a paradigm for training unconditional variational autoencoders (VAEs) for few-shot conditional image generation. D2C uses a learned diffusion-based prior over the latent representations to improve generation and contrastive self-supervised learning to improve representation quality. D2C can adapt to novel generation tasks conditioned on labels or mani…
Lanzhou University of Technology（兰州理工大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Few-shot meta-learning has been recently reviving with expectations to mimic humanity's fast adaption to new concepts based on prior knowledge. In this short communication, we give a concise review on recent representative methods in few-shot meta-learning, which are categorized into four branches according to their technical characteristics. We conclude this review with some vital current challenges and future prospects in few-shot meta-learning.
A Simple and Efficient Baseline for Zero-Shot Generative Classification
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Baidu（百度）
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani（皮拉尼比尔拉技术与科学学院）
Modern deep learning models have revolutionized the field of computer vision. But, a significant drawback of most of these models is that they require a large number of labelled examples to generalize properly. Recent developments in few-shot learning aim to alleviate this requirement. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight CNN architecture for 1-shot image segmentation. The proposed model is created by taking inspiration from well-performing architectures for semantic segmentation and adapting it to the 1-shot domain. We train our model using 4 meta-learning algorithms that have worked…
Zero-Shot Video Restoration and Enhancement with Assistance of Video Diffusion Models
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University（电子信息工程学院，天津大学）；Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Laboratory, School of Engineering Science, Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT（计算机视觉与模式识别实验室，工程科学学院，拉佩兰塔-拉赫蒂技术大学LUT）
Meta-learning algorithms produce feature extractors which achieve state-of-the-art performance on few-shot classification. While the literature is rich with meta-learning methods, little is known about why the resulting feature extractors perform so well. We develop a better understanding of the underlying mechanics of meta-learning and the difference between models trained using meta-learning and models which are trained classically. In doing so, we introduce and verify several hypotheses for why meta-learned models perform better. Furthermore, we develop a regularizer which boosts the perfor…
Rice University（莱斯大学）；University of Texas, Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
We present a new approach, called meta-meta classification, to learning in small-data settings. In this approach, one uses a large set of learning problems to design an ensemble of learners, where each learner has high bias and low variance and is skilled at solving a specific type of learning problem. The meta-meta classifier learns how to examine a given learning problem and combine the various learners to solve the problem. The meta-meta learning approach is especially suited to solving few-shot learning tasks, as it is easier to learn to classify a new learning problem with little data tha…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）
Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to generate a classifier using limited labeled examples. Many existing works take the meta-learning approach, constructing a few-shot learner that can learn from few-shot examples to generate a classifier. Typically, the few-shot learner is constructed or meta-trained by sampling multiple few-shot tasks in turn and optimizing the few-shot learner's performance in generating classifiers for those tasks. The performance is measured by how well the resulting classifiers classify the test (i.e., query) examples of those tasks. In this paper, we point out two potential …
School of Computing Science（计算机科学学院）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）
The goal of few-shot classification is to learn a model that can classify novel classes using only a few training examples. Despite the promising results shown by existing meta-learning algorithms in solving the few-shot classification problem, there still remains an important challenge: how to generalize to unseen domains while meta-learning on multiple seen domains? In this paper, we propose an optimization-based meta-learning method, called Combining Domain-Specific Meta-Learners (CosML), that addresses the cross-domain few-shot classification problem. CosML first trains a set of meta-learn…
Meta-learning model can quickly adapt to new tasks using few-shot labeled data. However, despite achieving good generalization on few-shot classification tasks, it is still challenging to improve the adversarial robustness of the meta-learning model in few-shot learning. Although adversarial training (AT) methods such as Adversarial Query (AQ) can improve the adversarially robust performance of meta-learning models, AT is still computationally expensive training. On the other hand, meta-learning models trained with AT will drop significant accuracy on the original clean images. This paper prop…
We propose a method for learning embeddings for few-shot learning that is suitable for use with any number of ways and any number of shots (shot-free). Rather than fixing the class prototypes to be the Euclidean average of sample embeddings, we allow them to live in a higher-dimensional space (embedded class models) and learn the prototypes along with the model parameters. The class representation function is defined implicitly, which allows us to deal with a variable number of shots per each class with a simple constant-size architecture. The class embedding encompasses metric learning, that …
Previous works on meta-learning either relied on elaborately hand-designed network structures or adopted specialized learning rules to a particular domain. We propose a universal framework to optimize the meta-learning process automatically by adopting neural architecture search technique (NAS). NAS automatically generates and evaluates meta-learner's architecture for few-shot learning problems, while the meta-learner uses meta-learning algorithm to optimize its parameters based on the distribution of learning tasks. Parameter sharing and experience replay are adopted to accelerate the archite…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Few-shot classification is the task of predicting the category of an example from a set of few labeled examples. The number of labeled examples per category is called the number of shots (or shot number). Recent works tackle this task through meta-learning, where a meta-learner extracts information from observed tasks during meta-training to quickly adapt to new tasks during meta-testing. In this formulation, the number of shots exploited during meta-training has an impact on the recognition performance at meta-test time. Generally, the shot number used in meta-training should match the one us…
Diffusion based Zero-shot Medical Image-to-Image Translation for Cross Modality Segmentation
Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging（阿西诺拉·A.马蒂诺斯生物医学成像中心）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Inria centre at Université Côte d’Azur（蔚蓝海岸大学国家信息与自动化研究所中心）；Temple University（天普大学）；Georg-August-University of Göttingen（哥廷根大学）
Zero-Shot Video Restoration and Enhancement with Text-to-Image Latent Diffusion Models and Multi-Modal References
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University（天津大学电气自动化与信息工程学院）；Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT（拉彭兰塔-拉赫蒂理工大学（LUT））
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft AI & Research（微软人工智能与研究院）；IBM T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
Few-shot learning aims to learn classifiers for new classes with only a few training examples per class. Most existing few-shot learning approaches belong to either metric-based meta-learning or optimization-based meta-learning category, both of which have achieved successes in the simplified "$k$-shot $N$-way" image classification settings. Specifically, the optimization-based approaches train a meta-learner to predict the parameters of the task-specific classifiers. The task-specific classifiers are required to be homogeneous-structured to ease the parameter prediction, so the meta-learning …
Few-shot learning is challenging for learning algorithms that learn each task in isolation and from scratch. In contrast, meta-learning learns from many related tasks a meta-learner that can learn a new task more accurately and faster with fewer examples, where the choice of meta-learners is crucial. In this paper, we develop Meta-SGD, an SGD-like, easily trainable meta-learner that can initialize and adapt any differentiable learner in just one step, on both supervised learning and reinforcement learning. Compared to the popular meta-learner LSTM, Meta-SGD is conceptually simpler, easier to i…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Tencent PCG（腾讯平台与内容事业群）
To replicate the success of text-to-image (T2I) generation, recent works employ large-scale video datasets to train a text-to-video (T2V) generator. Despite their promising results, such paradigm is computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a new T2V generation setting$\unicode{x2014}$One-Shot Video Tuning, where only one text-video pair is presented. Our model is built on state-of-the-art T2I diffusion models pre-trained on massive image data. We make two key observations: 1) T2I models can generate still images that represent verb terms; 2) extending T2I models to generate multiple…
