Papers › Rectifying the Shortcut Learning of Background for Few-Shot Learning

Rectifying the Shortcut Learning of Background for Few-Shot Learning

16 Jul 2021NeurIPS 2021 12arXiv:2107.07746archive 2025-07-28

Xu Luo, Longhui Wei, Liangjian Wen, Jinrong Yang, Lingxi Xie, Zenglin Xu, Qi Tian

The category gap between training and evaluation has been characterised as one of the main obstacles to the success of Few-Shot Learning (FSL). In this paper, we for the first time empirically identify image background, common in realistic images, as a shortcut knowledge helpful for in-class classification but ungeneralizable beyond training categories in FSL. A novel framework, COSOC, is designed to tackle this problem by extracting foreground objects in images at both training and evaluation without any extra supervision. Extensive experiments carried on inductive FSL tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches.

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Code

Frankluox/FewShotCodeBase officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Tasks

Few-Shot Image ClassificationFew-Shot LearningImage Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (1-shot) COSOC (inductive) Accuracy 69.28 #37 of 105 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (5-shot) COSOC (inductive) Accuracy 85.16 #23 of 95 Archive leaderboard report

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