Bi-Level Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Domain Generalization

Xiaorong Qin, Xinhang Song, Shuqiang Jiang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 15900-15910

The goal of few-shot learning is to learn the generalizability from seen to unseen data with only a few samples. Most previous few-shot learning focus on learning generalizability within particular domains. However, the more practical scenarios may also require generalizability across domains. In this paper, we study the problem of Few-shot domain generalization (FSDG), which is a more challenging variant of few-shot classification. FSDG requires additional generalization with larger gap from seen domains to unseen domains. We address FSDG problem by meta-learning two levels of meta-knowledge, where the lower-level meta-knowledge are domain-specific embedding spaces as subspaces of a base space for intra-domain generalization, and the upper-level meta-knowledge is the base space and a prior subspace over domain-specific spaces for inter-domain generalization. We formulate the two levels of meta-knowledge learning problem with bi-level optimization, and further develop an optimization algorithm without Hessian information to solve it. We demonstrate our method is significantly superior to the previous works by evaluating it on the widely used benchmark Meta-Dataset.