Augmented Bi-path Network for Few-shot Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces ABNet, a novel approach for few-shot learning that compares global and local features separately to improve classification accuracy with limited data.

Contribution

The paper proposes ABNet, which extracts and augments local features and compares global and local features in separate paths for better few-shot learning performance.

Findings

ABNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in few-shot learning.

Augmentation of features improves robustness and comparison accuracy.

Separate comparison of global and local features enhances classification results.

Abstract

Few-shot Learning (FSL) which aims to learn from few labeled training data is becoming a popular research topic, due to the expensive labeling cost in many real-world applications. One kind of successful FSL method learns to compare the testing (query) image and training (support) image by simply concatenating the features of two images and feeding it into the neural network. However, with few labeled data in each class, the neural network has difficulty in learning or comparing the local features of two images. Such simple image-level comparison may cause serious mis-classification. To solve this problem, we propose Augmented Bi-path Network (ABNet) for learning to compare both global and local features on multi-scales. Specifically, the salient patches are extracted and embedded as the local features for every image. Then, the model learns to augment the features for better robustness. Finally, the model learns to compare global and local features separately, i.e., in two paths, before merging the similarities. Extensive experiments show that the proposed ABNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Both quantitative and visual ablation studies are provided to verify that the proposed modules lead to more precise comparison results.