Less is more: A closer look at semantic-based few-shot learning

Few-shot Learning (FSL) aims to learn and distinguish new categories from a scant number of available samples, presenting a significant challenge in the realm of deep learning. Recent researchers have sought to leverage the additional semantic or linguistic information of scarce categories with a pre-trained language model to facilitate learning, thus partially alleviating the problem of insufficient supervision signals. Nonetheless, the full potential of the semantic information and pre-trained language model have been underestimated in the few-shot learning till now, resulting in limited performance enhancements. To address this, we propose a straightforward and efficacious framework for few-shot learning tasks, specifically designed to exploit the semantic information and language model. Specifically, we explicitly harness the zero-shot capability of the pre-trained language model with learnable prompts. And we directly add the visual feature with the textual feature for inference without the intricate designed fusion modules as in prior studies. Additionally, we apply the self-ensemble and distillation to further enhance performance. Extensive experiments conducted across four widely used few-shot datasets demonstrate that our simple framework achieves impressive results. Particularly noteworthy is its outstanding performance in the 1-shot learning task, surpassing the current state-of-the-art by an average of 3.3% in classification accuracy. Our code will be available at https://github.com/zhouchunpong/SimpleFewShot. © 2024 Elsevier B.V.