2. Few-Shot Learning
Few-shot learning (FSL) can be broadly categorized into three ways: (1) using external memory; (2) introducing previous knowledge into the model initialization parameters; and (3) using training data as prior knowledge.
The first way to use external memory is to store training characteristics in an external memory and then compare test features with the features read from the external memory to predict the label of the test sample. Santoro et al.
[5] first put forward the idea of using external memory to perform FSL problems in 2016, and their proposed memory-augmented neural network (MANN) can overcome the concerns with LSTM
[6] instability. MetaNet
[7], proposed by Munkhdalai et al., combines external memory and meta-learning. Qi Cai et al.
[8] proposed a memory matching network that uses storage support features and the corresponding category labels to form “key-value pairs” in a memory module. Kaiser et al.
[9] proposed a lifelong memory module that uses the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) to select k samples that are closest to the query sample and predicts the label of the sample. However, it should be noted that the extra storage space will increase the cost of training.
The second strategy, known as meta-learning, enables the model to learn how to learn by embedding prior knowledge into the model initialization parameters. MAML
[10], a gradient-based method proposed by Finn et al. in 2017, designs a me-ta-learner as an optimizer to update model parameters with only a few optimization steps when given novel examples. The MAML-based Meta-SGD
[11] algorithm can learn both the direction and the pace of optimization. Additionally, Nichol et al.
[12] proposed Reptile in 2018, which greatly reduces the computational complexity by avoiding the computation of two derivatives in MAML. MetaOptNet
[13] proposed replacing the nearest-neighbor method with a linear classifier that can be optimized for convex optimization learning.
The ways of using training data as prior knowledge are further divided into finetuning-based methods and metric-based methods. The goal of the former is to train the model using a lot of auxiliary data and then fine-tune it using the target few-shot dataset. The latter’s goal is to create a network that can distinguish between several classes by doing feature distance analysis. Many classical networks for few-shot classification are based on metric-based methods. MatchingNet
[14] generates a weighted nearest neighbor classifier by computing the mapping distance between the support set and the query set. ProtoNet
[15], proposed by Snell et al., extracts prototype features from samples of the same category and then predicts them by comparing the Euclidean distance between query features and prototype features. RelationNet
[16] uses an adaptive nonlinear classifier to measure the relationship between support features and query features.
23. Attention Mechanism
The attention technique was initially employed in the machine translation problem and is now extensively used in several deep learning disciplines
[4][17]. Humans selectively focus on a portion of all information while disregarding others due to the information processing bottleneck. Similar to how a human brain analyzes information, a neural network employs its attention mechanism to quickly focus on a small subset of important data.
Class activation mapping (CAM)
[18] has recently gotten more and more attention. CAM works as follows: first, delete the convolutional neural network’s (CNN) last fully connected layers; Secondly, substituting a global average pooling (GAP) layer for the maxpooling layer; computing the characteristics’ weighted average comes last. However, it must change CNN’s structure, and accuracy must be gradually increased by training, which slows the model’s convergence rate. Then, a variety of enhanced CAMs have been put out to expand CAM to more intricate CNN structures: Grad-CAM
[19] relies on gradients to weight features learned in the final convolutional layer and generalizes CAM without changing the model. Grad-CAM++
[20] improves Grad-CAM visualization by weighting the gradients pixel by pixel. CBAM
[21] is a lightweight general-purpose module that can be smoothly integrated into any convolutional neural network architecture
[22] to participate in end-to-end training. It infers the attention map along two distinct dimensions (channel and spatial).
Since the attention mechanism needs to be optimized over several iterations, it is time-consuming and not easy to locate and cover the entire object. The accuracy of the activation mechanism generally remains low because it often only focuses on a part of the object and may capture a lot of pointless information. Researchers use instance segmentation methods in the object localization module to achieve accurate localization in order to prevent information redundancy and misinformation. The instance segmentation method approach accurately and completely obtains objects by masking off non-object regions to eliminate the interference of background and pseudo-objects. It makes feature extraction more effective.
34. Graph Neural Network
GNN has been heavily utilized in FSL recently. Garcia et al.
[23] first suggested using GNN to solve few-shot image classification in 2018. They proposed to treat each sample as a node in the graph and use GNN to learn and update the embedding of the node, and then update the edge vector through the node vector. To further capitalize on intra-class similarities and inter-class differences, the conduction propagation network (TPN)
[24] proposed by Liu et al. leverages the complete query set for inference.
Kim et al.
[25] proposed an edge-labeled graph neural network, where the two dimensions of edge features correspond to the intra-class similarity and the inter-class difference of the two nodes connecting the edge, and then binary classification is performed to determine whether two nodes belong to the same class. Yang et al.
[26] proposed the distribution propagation graph neural network (DPGN), which constructs an explicit class distribution relationship. Gidaris et al.
[27] added denoising autoencoders (DAE) to GNN to correct the weights of few-shot categories. The GNN-based model is significant and should be explored widely because of its powerful information propagation and relationship expression abilities. Zhang et al.
[28] proposed a graph information aggregation cross-domain few-shot learning (Gia-CFSL) framework, intending to mitigate the impact of domain shift on FSL through domain alignment based on graph information aggregation. Zhong et al.
[29] presented a graph-complemented latent representation (GCLR) network for few-shot image classification to learn a better representation. A GNN is added to relational mining to better utilize the relationship between samples in each category.