Charting the Right Manifold: Manifold Mixup for Few-shot Learning
This work addresses the problem of learning robust representations for few-shot learning, which is incremental as it builds on existing regularization and self-supervised techniques.
The paper tackles few-shot learning by combining self-supervised learning and Manifold Mixup to regularize feature manifolds, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy improvements of 3-8% on standard datasets like CIFAR-FS and mini-ImageNet.
Few-shot learning algorithms aim to learn model parameters capable of adapting to unseen classes with the help of only a few labeled examples. A recent regularization technique - Manifold Mixup focuses on learning a general-purpose representation, robust to small changes in the data distribution. Since the goal of few-shot learning is closely linked to robust representation learning, we study Manifold Mixup in this problem setting. Self-supervised learning is another technique that learns semantically meaningful features, using only the inherent structure of the data. This work investigates the role of learning relevant feature manifold for few-shot tasks using self-supervision and regularization techniques. We observe that regularizing the feature manifold, enriched via self-supervised techniques, with Manifold Mixup significantly improves few-shot learning performance. We show that our proposed method S2M2 beats the current state-of-the-art accuracy on standard few-shot learning datasets like CIFAR-FS, CUB, mini-ImageNet and tiered-ImageNet by 3-8 %. Through extensive experimentation, we show that the features learned using our approach generalize to complex few-shot evaluation tasks, cross-domain scenarios and are robust against slight changes to data distribution.