Adaptive Manifold for Imbalanced Transductive Few-Shot Learning

Michalis Lazarou, Yannis Avrithis, Tania Stathaki; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 2297-2306

Transductive few-shot learning algorithms have showed substantially superior performance over their inductive counterparts by leveraging the unlabeled queries at inference. However, the vast majority of transductive methods are evaluated on perfectly class-balanced benchmarks. It has been shown that they undergo remarkable drop in performance under a more realistic, imbalanced setting. To this end, we propose a novel algorithm to address imbalanced transductive few-shot learning, named Adaptive Manifold. Our algorithm exploits the underlying manifold of the labeled examples and unlabeled queries by using manifold similarity to predict the class probability distribution of every query. It is parameterized by one centroid per class and a set of manifold parameters that determine the manifold. All parameters are optimized by minimizing a loss function that can be tuned towards class-balanced or imbalanced distributions. The manifold similarity shows substantial improvement over Euclidean distance, especially in the 1-shot setting. Our algorithm outperforms all other state of the art methods in three benchmark datasets, namely miniImageNet, tieredImageNet and CUB, and two different backbones, namely ResNet-18 and WideResNet-28-10. In certain cases, our algorithm outperforms the previous state of the art by as much as 4.2%. The publicly available source code can be found in https://github.com/MichalisLazarou/AM.