{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/revisiting-few-shot-learning-from-a-causal","title":"Revisiting Few-Shot Learning from a Causal Perspective","arxiv_id":"2209.13816","date":"2022-09-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Guoliang Lin","Yongheng Xu","Hanjiang Lai","Jian Yin"],"abstract":"Few-shot learning with $N$-way $K$-shot scheme is an open challenge in machine learning. Many metric-based approaches have been proposed to tackle this problem, e.g., the Matching Networks and CLIP-Adapter. Despite that these approaches have shown significant progress, the mechanism of why these methods succeed has not been well explored. In this paper, we try to interpret these metric-based few-shot learning methods via causal mechanism. We show that the existing approaches can be viewed as specific forms of front-door adjustment, which can alleviate the effect of spurious correlations and thus learn the causality. This causal interpretation could provide us a new perspective to better understand these existing metric-based methods. Further, based on this causal interpretation, we simply introduce two causal methods for metric-based few-shot learning, which considers not only the relationship between examples but also the diversity of representations. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods in few-shot classification on various benchmark datasets. Code is available in https://github.com/lingl1024/causalFewShot.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.13816v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.13816v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"revisiting-few-shot-learning-from-a-causal","repo_url":"https://github.com/lingl1024/causalfewshot","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"},{"task_slug":"few-shot-learning","task_name":"Few-Shot Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2209.13816","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}