EASE: Unsupervised Discriminant Subspace Learning for Transductive Few-Shot Learning

Hao Zhu, Piotr Koniusz; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 9078-9088

Few-shot learning (FSL) has received a lot of attention due to its remarkable ability to adapt to novel classes. Although many techniques have been proposed for FSL, they mostly focus on improving FSL backbones. Some works also focus on learning on top of the features generated by these backbones to adapt them to novel classes. We present an unsupErvised discriminAnt Subspace lEarning (EASE) that improves transductive few-shot learning performance by learning a linear projection onto a subspace built from features of the support set and the unlabeled query set in the test time. Specifically, based on the support set and the unlabeled query set, we generate the similarity matrix and the dissimilarity matrix based on the structure prior for the proposed EASE method, which is efficiently solved with SVD. We also introduce conStraIned wAsserstein MEan Shift clustEring (SIAMESE) which extends Sinkhorn K-means by incorporating labeled support samples. SIAMESE works on the features obtained from EASE to estimate class centers and query predictions. On the mini-ImageNet, tiered-ImageNet, CIFAR-FS, CUB and OpenMIC benchmarks, both steps significantly boost the performance in transductive FSL and semi-supervised FSL.