We propose a novel architecture for k-shot classification on the Omniglot dataset. Building on prototypical networks, we extend their architecture to what we call Gaussian prototypical networks. Prototypical networks learn a map between images and embedding vectors, and use their clustering for classification. In our model, a part of the encoder output is interpreted as a confidence region estimate about the embedding point, and expressed as a Gaussian covariance matrix. Our network then constructs a direction and class dependent distance metric on the embedding space, using uncertainties of individual data points as weights. We show that Gaussian prototypical networks are a preferred architecture over vanilla prototypical networks with an equivalent number of parameters. We report results consistent with state-of-the-art performance in 1-shot and 5-shot classification both in 5-way and 20-way regime on the Omniglot dataset. We explore artificially down-sampling a fraction of images in the training set, which improves our performance. Our experiments therefore lead us to hypothesize that Gaussian prototypical networks might perform better in less homogeneous, noisier datasets, which are commonplace in real world applications. In this paper we proposed Gaussian prototypical networks for few-shot classification -an improved architecture based on prototypical networks BID16 . We tested our models on the Omniglot dataset, and explored different approaches to generating a covariance matrix estimate together with an embedding vector. We showed that Gaussian prototypical networks outperform vanilla prototypical networks with a comparable number of parameters, and therefore that our architecture choice is beneficial. We found that estimating a single real number on top of an embedding vector works better than estimating a diagonal, or a full covariance matrix. We suspect that lower quality, less homogeneous datasets might prefer a more complex covariance matrix estimate.Contrary to BID16 , we found that the best results are obtained by training in the 1-shot regime. Our results are consistent with state-of-the-art in 1-shot and 5-shot classification both in Figure 5 : Predicted covariances for the original test set and a partially down-sampled version of it. The Gaussian network learned to down-weight damaged examples by predicting a higher s, as apparent from the heavier tail of the yellow distribution. The distributions are aligned together, as only the difference between the leading edge and a value influence classification.5-way and 20-way regime on the Omniglot dataset. Especially for 5-way classification, our results are very close to perfect performance.We got better accuracies (in particular for (k > 1)-shot classification) by artificially down-sampling fractions of our training dataset, encouraging the network to fully utilize covariance estimates. We hypothesize that the ability to learn the embedding as well as its uncertainty would be even more beneficial for poorer-quality, heterogeneous datasets, which are commonplace in real world applications. There, down-weighting some data points might be crucial for faithful classification. This is supported by our experiments with down-sampling Omniglot.
A novel architecture for few-shot classification capable of dealing with uncertainty.
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