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Complementing Representation Deficiency in Few-shot Image Classification: A Meta-Learning Approach

21 Jul 2020arXiv:2007.10778archive 2025-07-28

Xian Zhong, Cheng Gu, Wenxin Huang, Lin Li, Shuqin Chen, Chia-Wen Lin

Few-shot learning is a challenging problem that has attracted more and more attention recently since abundant training samples are difficult to obtain in practical applications. Meta-learning has been proposed to address this issue, which focuses on quickly adapting a predictor as a base-learner to new tasks, given limited labeled samples. However, a critical challenge for meta-learning is the representation deficiency since it is hard to discover common information from a small number of training samples or even one, as is the representation of key features from such little information. As a result, a meta-learner cannot be trained well in a high-dimensional parameter space to generalize to new tasks. Existing methods mostly resort to extracting less expressive features so as to avoid the representation deficiency. Aiming at learning better representations, we propose a meta-learning approach with complemented representations network (MCRNet) for few-shot image classification. In particular, we embed a latent space, where latent codes are reconstructed with extra representation information to complement the representation deficiency. Furthermore, the latent space is established with variational inference, collaborating well with different base-learners, and can be extended to other models. Finally, our end-to-end framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance in image classification on three standard few-shot learning datasets.

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GuChenghs/MCRNet mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Few-Shot Image ClassificationFew-Shot LearningGeneral ClassificationImage ClassificationMeta-LearningVariational Inferenceimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Few-Shot Image Classification CIFAR-FS 5-way (1-shot) MCRNet-SVM Accuracy 74.7 #27 of 38 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification CIFAR-FS 5-way (1-shot) MCRNet-RR Accuracy 73.8 #30 of 38 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification CIFAR-FS 5-way (5-shot) MCRNet-SVM Accuracy 86.8 #25 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification CIFAR-FS 5-way (5-shot) MCRNet-RR Accuracy 85.2 #30 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification FC100 5-way (1-shot) MCRNet-SVM Accuracy 41 #20 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification FC100 5-way (1-shot) MCRNet-RR Accuracy 40.7 #21 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification FC100 5-way (5-shot) MCRNet-SVM Accuracy 57.8 #18 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification FC100 5-way (5-shot) MCRNet-RR Accuracy 56.6 #21 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (1-shot) MCRNet-SVM Accuracy 62.53 #67 of 105 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (1-shot) MCRNet-RR Accuracy 61.32 #72 of 105 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (5-shot) MCRNet-SVM Accuracy 80.34 #52 of 95 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (5-shot) MCRNet-RR Accuracy 78.16 #60 of 95 Archive leaderboard report

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