Abstract This paper investigates the role of saliency to improve the classification accuracy of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the case when scarce training data is available. Our approach consists in adding a saliency branch to an existing CNN architecture which is used to modulate the standard bottom-up visual features from the original image input, acting as an attentional mechanism that guides the feature extraction process. The main aim of the proposed approach is to enable the effective training of a fine-grained recognition model with limited training samples and to improve the performance on the task, thereby alleviating the need to annotate a large dataset. The vast majority of saliency methods are evaluated on their ability to generate saliency maps, and not on their functionality in a complete vision pipeline. Our proposed pipeline allows to evaluate saliency methods for the high-level task of object recognition. We perform extensive experiments on various fine-grained datasets (Flowers, Birds, Cars, and Dogs) under different conditions and show that saliency can considerably improve the network’s performance, especially for the case of scarce training data. Furthermore, our experiments show that saliency methods that obtain improved saliency maps (as measured by traditional saliency benchmarks) also translate to saliency methods that yield improved performance gains when applied in an object recognition pipeline.
Few-shot learning: Few-shot learning aims to create models for which very few labeled samples are available. Early work on this topic is attributed to Fei- @cite_15 , who showed that, taking advantage of previously learned categories, it is possible to learn new categories using one or very few samples per class. More recently, @cite_34 proposed a conditional distance measure that takes into account how a particular appearance model varies with respect to every other model in a model database. The approach has been applied to one-shot gesture recognition. Nowadays, several deep learning-based approaches have emerged to address the problem of few-shot learning. We can identify three main strategies. One family is based on metric learning. @cite_8 , the authors propose a framework that trains a network to map a small labeled support set and an unlabeled example to its label. An extension of this idea is presented in Prototypical networks @cite_39 , but in this case each class in the support set has been substituted by a prototype' (computed as the mean of the samples in the corresponding class), to which each sample is compared.
@cite_15 @cite_34 @cite_39 @cite_8
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A recent approach to few-shot classification called matching networks has demonstrated the benefits of coupling metric learning with a training procedure that mimics test. This approach relies on a complicated fine-tuning procedure and an attention scheme that forms a distribution over all points in the support set, scaling poorly with its size. We propose a more streamlined approach, prototypical networks, that learns a metric space in which few-shot classification can be performed by computing Euclidean distances to prototype representations of each class, rather than individual points. Our method is competitive with state-of-the-art one-shot classification approaches while being much simpler and more scalable with the size of the support set. We empirically demonstrate the performance of our approach on the Omniglot and mini-ImageNet datasets. We further demonstrate that a similar idea can be used for zero-shot learning, where each class is described by a set of attributes, and achieve state-of-the-art results on the Caltech UCSD bird dataset. The key issue of few-shot learning is learning to generalize. This paper proposes a large margin principle to improve the generalization capacity of metric based methods for few-shot learning. To realize it, we develop a unified framework to learn a more discriminative metric space by augmenting the classification loss function with a large margin distance loss function for training. Extensive experiments on two state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods, graph neural networks and prototypical networks, show that our method can improve the performance of existing models substantially with very little computational overhead, demonstrating the effectiveness of the large margin principle and the potential of our method. In few-shot classification, we are interested in learning algorithms that train a classifier from only a handful of labeled examples. Recent progress in few-shot classification has featured meta-learning, in which a parameterized model for a learning algorithm is defined and trained on episodes representing different classification problems, each with a small labeled training set and its corresponding test set. In this work, we advance this few-shot classification paradigm towards a scenario where unlabeled examples are also available within each episode. We consider two situations: one where all unlabeled examples are assumed to belong to the same set of classes as the labeled examples of the episode, as well as the more challenging situation where examples from other distractor classes are also provided. To address this paradigm, we propose novel extensions of Prototypical Networks (, 2017) that are augmented with the ability to use unlabeled examples when producing prototypes. These models are trained in an end-to-end way on episodes, to learn to leverage the unlabeled examples successfully. We evaluate these methods on versions of the Omniglot and miniImageNet benchmarks, adapted to this new framework augmented with unlabeled examples. We also propose a new split of ImageNet, consisting of a large set of classes, with a hierarchical structure. Our experiments confirm that our Prototypical Networks can learn to improve their predictions due to unlabeled examples, much like a semi-supervised algorithm would. In this paper, we are interested in the few-shot learning problem. In particular, we focus on a challenging scenario where the number of categories is large and the number of examples per novel category is very limited, e.g. 1, 2, or 3. Motivated by the close relationship between the parameters and the activations in a neural network associated with the same category, we propose a novel method that can adapt a pre-trained neural network to novel categories by directly predicting the parameters from the activations. Zero training is required in adaptation to novel categories, and fast inference is realized by a single forward pass. We evaluate our method by doing few-shot image recognition on the ImageNet dataset, which achieves the state-of-the-art classification accuracy on novel categories by a significant margin while keeping comparable performance on the large-scale categories. We also test our method on the MiniImageNet dataset and it strongly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods.