Papers › Few-Shot Learning as Domain Adaptation: Algorithm and Analysis

Few-Shot Learning as Domain Adaptation: Algorithm and Analysis

6 Feb 2020arXiv:2002.02050archive 2025-07-28

Jiechao Guan, Zhiwu Lu, Tao Xiang, Ji-Rong Wen

To recognize the unseen classes with only few samples, few-shot learning (FSL) uses prior knowledge learned from the seen classes. A major challenge for FSL is that the distribution of the unseen classes is different from that of those seen, resulting in poor generalization even when a model is meta-trained on the seen classes. This class-difference-caused distribution shift can be considered as a special case of domain shift. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a domain adaptation prototypical network with attention (DAPNA) to explicitly tackle such a domain shift problem in a meta-learning framework. Specifically, armed with a set transformer based attention module, we construct each episode with two sub-episodes without class overlap on the seen classes to simulate the domain shift between the seen and unseen classes. To align the feature distributions of the two sub-episodes with limited training samples, a feature transfer network is employed together with a margin disparity discrepancy (MDD) loss. Importantly, theoretical analysis is provided to give the learning bound of our DAPNA. Extensive experiments show that our DAPNA outperforms the state-of-the-art FSL alternatives, often by significant margins.

PaperPDF

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Domain AdaptationFew-Shot Image ClassificationFew-Shot LearningMeta-Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-ImageNet-CUB 5-way (1-shot) DAPNA Accuracy 49.44 #4 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-ImageNet-CUB 5-way (5-shot) DAPNA Accuracy 68.33 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (1-shot) DAPNA Accuracy 71.88 #29 of 105 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (5-shot) DAPNA Accuracy 84.07 #33 of 95 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Tiered ImageNet 5-way (1-shot) DAPNA Accuracy 69.14 #35 of 49 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Tiered ImageNet 5-way (5-shot) DAPNA Accuracy 85.82 #30 of 51 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSet TransformerSoftmaxTransformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections