Papers › Prototype Completion for Few-Shot Learning

Prototype Completion for Few-Shot Learning

11 Aug 2021arXiv:2108.05010archive 2025-07-28

Baoquan Zhang, Xutao Li, Yunming Ye, Shanshan Feng

Few-shot learning aims to recognize novel classes with few examples. Pre-training based methods effectively tackle the problem by pre-training a feature extractor and then fine-tuning it through the nearest centroid based meta-learning. However, results show that the fine-tuning step makes marginal improvements. In this paper, 1) we figure out the reason, i.e., in the pre-trained feature space, the base classes already form compact clusters while novel classes spread as groups with large variances, which implies that fine-tuning feature extractor is less meaningful; 2) instead of fine-tuning feature extractor, we focus on estimating more representative prototypes. Consequently, we propose a novel prototype completion based meta-learning framework. This framework first introduces primitive knowledge (i.e., class-level part or attribute annotations) and extracts representative features for seen attributes as priors. Second, a part/attribute transfer network is designed to learn to infer the representative features for unseen attributes as supplementary priors. Finally, a prototype completion network is devised to learn to complete prototypes with these priors. Moreover, to avoid the prototype completion error, we further develop a Gaussian based prototype fusion strategy that fuses the mean-based and completed prototypes by exploiting the unlabeled samples. Extensive experiments show that our method: (i) obtains more accurate prototypes; (ii) achieves superior performance on both inductive and transductive FSL settings.

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zhangbq-research/Prototype_Completion_for_FSL officialmentioned in paperpytorchMIT report

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Tasks

AttributeFew-Shot Image ClassificationFew-Shot LearningMeta-Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (1-shot) PrototypeCompletion Accuracy 79.01 #15 of 105 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (5-shot) PrototypeCompletion Accuracy 84.18 #31 of 95 Archive leaderboard report

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