A CLOSER LOOK AT FEW-SHOT CLASSIFICATION (Baseline++) (ICLR'2019)

Abstract

Few-shot classification aims to learn a classifier to recognize unseen classes during training with limited labeled examples. While significant progress has been made, the growing complexity of network designs, meta-learning algorithms, and differences in implementation details make a fair comparison difficult. In this paper, we present 1) a consistent comparative analysis of several representative few-shot classification algorithms, with results showing that deeper backbones significantly reduce the performance differences among methods on datasets with limited domain differences, 2) a modified baseline method that surprisingly achieves competitive performance when compared with the state-of-the-art on both the mini- ImageNet and the CUB datasets, and 3) a new experimental setting for evaluating the cross-domain generalization ability for few-shot classification algorithms. Our results reveal that reducing intra-class variation is an important factor when the feature backbone is shallow, but not as critical when using deeper backbones. In a realistic cross-domain evaluation setting, we show that a baseline method with a standard fine-tuning practice compares favorably against other state-of-the-art few-shot learning algorithms.

Citation

@inproceedings{chen2019closerfewshot,
    title={A Closer Look at Few-shot Classification},
    author={Chen, Wei-Yu and Liu, Yen-Cheng and Kira, Zsolt and Wang, Yu-Chiang and  Huang, Jia-Bin},
    booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
    year={2019}
}

How to Reproduce Baseline++

It consists of two steps:

• Step1: Base training

  • use all the images of base classes to train a base model.
  • conduct meta testing on validation set to select the best model.

• Step2: Meta Testing:

  • use best model from step1, the best model are saved into ${WORK_DIR}/${CONFIG}/best_accuracy_mean.pth in default.

An example of CUB dataset with Conv4

# base training
python ./tools/classification/train.py \
  configs/classification/baseline_plus/cub/baseline-plus_conv4_1xb64_cub_5way-1shot.py

# meta testing
python ./tools/classification/test.py \
  configs/classification/baseline_plus/cub/baseline-plus_conv4_1xb64_cub_5way-1shot.py \
  work_dir/baseline-plus_conv4_1xb64_cub_5way-1shot/best_accuracy_mean.pth

Note:

• All the result are trained with single gpu.
• The configs of 1 shot and 5 shot use same training setting, but different meta test setting on validation set and test set.
• Currently, we use model selected by 1 shot validation (100 episodes) to evaluate both 1 shot and 5 shot setting on test set.
• The hyper-parameters in configs are roughly set and probably not the optimal one so feel free to tone and try different configurations. For example, try different learning rate or validation episodes for each setting. Anyway, we will continue to improve it.

Results on CUB dataset with 2000 episodes

Results on Mini-ImageNet dataset with 2000 episodes

Results on Tiered-ImageNet dataset with 2000 episodes