Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning via Multi-Factor Clustering

Jie Ling, Lei Liao, Meng Yang, Jia Shuai; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 14564-14573

The scarcity of labeled data and the problem of model overfitting have been the challenges in few-shot learning. Recently, semi-supervised few-shot learning has been developed to obtain pseudo-labels of unlabeled samples for expanding the support set. However, the relationship between unlabeled and labeled data is not well exploited in generating pseudo labels, the noise of which will directly harm the model learning. In this paper, we propose a Clustering-based semi-supervised Few-Shot Learning (cluster-FSL) method to solve the above problems in image classification. By using multi-factor collaborative representation, a novel Multi-Factor Clustering (MFC) is designed to fuse the information of few-shot data distribution, which can generate soft and hard pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples based on labeled data. And we exploit the pseudo labels of unlabeled samples by MFC to expand the support set for obtaining more distribution information. Furthermore, robust data augmentation is used for support set in fine-tuning phase to increase the diversity of labeled samples. We verified the validity of the cluster-FSL by comparing it with other few-shot learning methods on three popular benchmark datasets, miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, and CUB-200-2011. The ablation experiments further demonstrate that our MFC can effectively fuse distribution information of labeled samples and provide high-quality pseudo-labels.