How to trust unlabeled data? Instance Credibility Inference for Few-Shot Learning
This addresses the scalability of deep learning to real-world categories with limited labeled data, though it is an incremental improvement over existing few-shot learning approaches.
The paper tackles few-shot learning by proposing Instance Credibility Inference (ICI), a statistical method that uses unlabeled data to augment training sets, achieving guaranteed selection of correctly-predicted instances under theoretical conditions.
Deep learning based models have excelled in many computer vision tasks and appear to surpass humans' performance. However, these models require an avalanche of expensive human labeled training data and many iterations to train their large number of parameters. This severely limits their scalability to the real-world long-tail distributed categories, some of which are with a large number of instances, but with only a few manually annotated. Learning from such extremely limited labeled examples is known as Few-shot learning (FSL). Different to prior arts that leverage meta-learning or data augmentation strategies to alleviate this extremely data-scarce problem, this paper presents a statistical approach, dubbed Instance Credibility Inference (ICI) to exploit the support of unlabeled instances for few-shot visual recognition. Typically, we repurpose the self-taught learning paradigm to predict pseudo-labels of unlabeled instances with an initial classifier trained from the few shot and then select the most confident ones to augment the training set to re-train the classifier. This is achieved by constructing a (Generalized) Linear Model (LM/GLM) with incidental parameters to model the mapping from (un-)labeled features to their (pseudo-)labels, in which the sparsity of the incidental parameters indicates the credibility of the corresponding pseudo-labeled instance. We rank the credibility of pseudo-labeled instances along the regularization path of their corresponding incidental parameters, and the most trustworthy pseudo-labeled examples are preserved as the augmented labeled instances. Theoretically, under mild conditions of restricted eigenvalue, irrepresentability, and large error, our approach is guaranteed to collect all the correctly-predicted instances from the noisy pseudo-labeled set.