Self-supervised Network Evolution for Few-shot Classification

Few-shot classification aims to recognize new classes by learning reliable models from very few available samples. It could be very challenging when there is no intersection between the already-known classes (base set) and the novel set (new classes). To alleviate this problem, we propose to evolve the network (for the base set) via label propagation and self-supervision to shrink the distribution difference between the base set and the novel set. Our network evolution approach transfers the latent distribution from the already-known classes to the unknown (novel) classes by: (a) label propagation of the novel/new classes (novel set); and (b) design of dual-task to exploit a discriminative representation to effectively diminish the overfitting on the base set and enhance the generalization ability on the novel set. We conduct comprehensive experiments to examine our network evolution approach against numerous state-of-the-art ones, especially in a higher way setup and cross-dataset scenarios. Notably, our approach outperforms the second best state-of-the-art method by a large margin of 3.25% for one-shot evaluation over miniImageNet.