Single image-level annotations only correctly describe an often small subset of an image's content, particularly when complex real-world scenes are depicted. While this might be acceptable in many classification scenarios, it poses a significant challenge for applications where the set of classes differs significantly between training and test time. In this paper, we take a closer look at the implications in the context of few-shot learning. Splitting the input samples into patches and encoding these via the help of Vision Transformers allows us to establish semantic correspondences between local regions across images and independent of their respective class. The most informative patch embeddings for the task at hand are then determined as a function of the support set via online optimization at inference time, additionally providing visual interpretability of'what matters most' in the image. We build on recent advances in unsupervised training of networks via masked image modelling to overcome the lack of fine-grained labels and learn the more general statistical structure of the data while avoiding negative image-level annotation influence, aka supervision collapse. Experimental results show the competitiveness of our approach, achieving new state-of-the-art results on four popular few-shot classification benchmarks for 5-shot and 1-shot scenarios.

Few-shot image classification has become a popular research topic for its wide application in real-world scenarios, however the problem of supervision collapse induced by single image-level annotation remains a major challenge. Existing methods aim to tackle this problem by locating and aligning relevant local features. However, the high intra-class variability in real-world images poses significant challenges in locating semantically relevant local regions under few-shot settings. Drawing inspiration from the human's complementary learning system, which excels at rapidly capturing and integrating semantic features from limited examples, we propose the generalization-optimized Systems Consolidation Adaptive Memory Dual-Network, SCAM-Net. This approach simulates the systems consolidation of complementary learning system with an adaptive memory module, which successfully addresses the difficulty of identifying meaningful features in few-shot scenarios. Specifically, we construct a Hippocampus-Neocortex dual-network that consolidates structured representation of each category, the structured representation is then stored and adaptively regulated following the generalization optimization principle in a long-term memory inside Neocortex. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed model has achieved state-of-the-art performance.

Few-shot learning aims to generalize the recognizer from seen categories to an entirely novel scenario. With only a few support samples, several advanced methods initially introduce class names as prior knowledge for identifying novel classes. However, obstacles still impede achieving a comprehensive understanding of how to harness the mutual advantages of visual and textual knowledge. In this paper, we propose a coherent Bidirectional Knowledge Permeation strategy called BiKop, which is grounded in a human intuition: A class name description offers a general representation, whereas an image captures the specificity of individuals. BiKop primarily establishes a hierarchical joint general-specific representation through bidirectional knowledge permeation. On the other hand, considering the bias of joint representation towards the base set, we disentangle base-class-relevant semantics during training, thereby alleviating the suppression of potential novel-class-relevant information. Experiments on four challenging benchmarks demonstrate the remarkable superiority of BiKop. Our code will be publicly available.

Few-shot Learning aims to learn and distinguish new categories with a very limited number of available images, presenting a significant challenge in the realm of deep learning. Recent researchers have sought to leverage the additional textual or linguistic information of these rare categories with a pre-trained language model to facilitate learning, thus partially alleviating the problem of insufficient supervision signals. However, the full potential of the textual information and pre-trained language model have been underestimated in the few-shot learning till now, resulting in limited performance enhancements. To address this, we propose a simple but effective framework for few-shot learning tasks, specifically designed to exploit the textual information and language model. In more detail, we explicitly exploit the zero-shot capability of the pre-trained language model with the learnable prompt. And we just add the visual feature with the textual feature for inference directly without the intricate designed fusion modules in previous works. Additionally, we apply the self-ensemble and distillation to further enhance these components. Our extensive experiments conducted across four widely used few-shot datasets demonstrate that our simple framework achieves impressive results. Particularly noteworthy is its outstanding performance in the 1-shot learning task, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by an average of 3.0\% in classification accuracy. \footnote{We will make the source codes of the proposed framework publicly available upon acceptance. }.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) emerge to achieve impressive performance on many data-abundant computer vision tasks by capturing long-range dependencies among local features. However, under few-shot learning (FSL) settings on small datasets with only a few labeled data, ViT tends to overfit and suffers from severe performance degradation due to its absence of CNN-alike inductive bias. Previous works in FSL avoid such problem either through the help of self-supervised auxiliary losses, or through the dextile uses of label information under supervised settings. But the gap between self-supervised and supervised few-shot Transformers is still unfilled. Inspired by recent advances in self-supervised knowledge distillation and masked image modeling (MIM), we propose a novel Supervised Masked Knowledge Distillation model (SMKD) for few-shot Transformers which incorporates label information into self-distillation frameworks. Compared with previous self-supervised methods, we allow intra-class knowledge distillation on both class and patch tokens, and introduce the challenging task of masked patch tokens reconstruction across intra-class images. Experimental results on four few-shot classification benchmark datasets show that our method with simple design outperforms previous methods by a large margin and achieves a new start-of-the-art. Detailed ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component of our model. Code for this paper is available here: https://github.com/HL-hanlin/SMKD.