Is Meta-Learning Out? Rethinking Unsupervised Few-Shot Classification with Limited Entropy

Yunchuan Guan, Yu Liu, Ke Zhou, Zhiqi Shen, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Serge Belongie, Lei Li; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025, pp. 4188-4197

Meta-learning is a powerful paradigm for tackling few-shot tasks. However, recent studies indicate that models trained with the whole-class training strategy can achieve comparable performance to those trained with meta-learning in few-shot classification tasks. To demonstrate the value of meta-learning, we establish an entropy-limited supervised setting for fair comparisons. Through both theoretical analysis and experimental validation, we establish that meta-learning has a tighter generalization bound compared to whole-class training. We unravel that meta-learning is more efficient with limited entropy and is more robust to label noise and heterogeneous tasks, making it well-suited for unsupervised tasks. Based on these insights, We propose MINO, a meta-learning framework designed to enhance unsupervised performance. MINO utilizes the adaptive clustering algorithm DBSCAN with a dynamic head for unsupervised task construction and a stability-based meta-scaler for robustness against label noise. Extensive experiments confirm its effectiveness in multiple unsupervised few-shot and zero-shot tasks.