Understanding Episode Hardness in Few-Shot Learning

Achieving generalization for deep learning models has usually suffered from the bottleneck of annotated sample scarcity. As a common way of tackling this issue, few-shot learning focuses on "episodes", i.e. sampled tasks that help the model acquire generalizable knowledge onto unseen categ...

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Veröffentlicht in:IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence. - 1979. - PP(2024) vom: 08. Okt.
1. Verfasser: Guo, Yurong (VerfasserIn)
Weitere Verfasser: Du, Ruoyi, Sain, Aneeshan, Liang, Kongming, Dong, Yuan, Song, Yi-Zhe, Ma, Zhanyu
Format: Online-Aufsatz
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk:IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence
Schlagworte:Journal Article
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Achieving generalization for deep learning models has usually suffered from the bottleneck of annotated sample scarcity. As a common way of tackling this issue, few-shot learning focuses on "episodes", i.e. sampled tasks that help the model acquire generalizable knowledge onto unseen categories - better the episodes, the higher a model's generalisability. Despite extensive research, the characteristics of episodes and their potential effects are relatively less explored. A recent paper discussed that different episodes exhibit different prediction difficulties, and coined a new metric "hardness" to quantify episodes, which however is too wide-range for an arbitrary dataset and thus remains impractical for realistic applications. In this paper therefore, we for the first time conduct an algebraic analysis of the critical factors influencing episode hardness supported by experimental demonstrations, that reveal episode hardness to largely depend on classes within an episode, and importantly propose an efficient pre-sampling hardness assessment technique named Inverse-Fisher Discriminant Ratio (IFDR). This enables sampling hard episodes at the class level via class-level (cl) sampling scheme that drastically decreases quantification cost. Delving deeper, we also develop a variant called class-pair-level (cpl) sampling, which further reduces the sampling cost while guaranteeing the sampled distribution. Finally, comprehensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets verify the efficacy of our proposed method. Codes are available at: https://github.com/PRIS-CV/class-level-sampling
Beschreibung:Date Revised 08.10.2024
published: Print-Electronic
Citation Status Publisher
ISSN:1939-3539
DOI:10.1109/TPAMI.2024.3476075