Papers › Self-Supervised Prototypical Transfer Learning for Few-Shot Classification
Self-Supervised Prototypical Transfer Learning for Few-Shot Classification
Carlos Medina, Arnout Devos, Matthias Grossglauser
Most approaches in few-shot learning rely on costly annotated data related to the goal task domain during (pre-)training. Recently, unsupervised meta-learning methods have exchanged the annotation requirement for a reduction in few-shot classification performance. Simultaneously, in settings with realistic domain shift, common transfer learning has been shown to outperform supervised meta-learning. Building on these insights and on advances in self-supervised learning, we propose a transfer learning approach which constructs a metric embedding that clusters unlabeled prototypical samples and their augmentations closely together. This pre-trained embedding is a starting point for few-shot classification by summarizing class clusters and fine-tuning. We demonstrate that our self-supervised prototypical transfer learning approach ProtoTransfer outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised meta-learning methods on few-shot tasks from the mini-ImageNet dataset. In few-shot experiments with domain shift, our approach even has comparable performance to supervised methods, but requires orders of magnitude fewer labels.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unsupervised Few-Shot Image Classification | Mini-Imagenet 5-way (1-shot) | ProtoTransfer | Accuracy | 45.67 | #17 of 28 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Unsupervised Few-Shot Image Classification | Mini-Imagenet 5-way (5-shot) | ProtoTransfer | Accuracy | 62.99 | #16 of 28 | 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.
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