Few-Shot Image Recognition by Predicting Parameters From Activations

Siyuan Qiao, Chenxi Liu, Wei Shen, Alan L. Yuille; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 7229-7238

In this paper, we are interested in the few-shot learning problem. In particular, we focus on a challenging scenario where the number of categories is large and the number of examples per novel category is very limited, e.g. 1, 2, or 3. Motivated by the close relationship between the parameters and the activations in a neural network associated with the same category, we propose a novel method that can adapt a pre-trained neural network to novel categories by directly predicting the parameters from the activations. Zero training is required in adaptation to novel categories, and fast inference is realized by a single forward pass. We evaluate our method by doing few-shot image recognition on the ImageNet dataset, which achieves the state-of-the-art classification accuracy on novel categories by a significant margin while keeping comparable performance on the large-scale categories. We also test our method on the MiniImageNet dataset and it strongly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods.