Continual Local Replacement for Few-shot Image Recognition

The goal of few-shot learning is to learn a model that can recognize novel classes based on one or few training data. It is challenging mainly due to two aspects: (1) it lacks good feature representation of novel classes; (2) a few labeled data could not accurately represent the true data distribution. In this work, we use a sophisticated network architecture to learn better feature representation and focus on the second issue. A novel continual local replacement strategy is proposed to address the data deficiency problem. It takes advantage of the content in unlabeled images to continually enhance labeled ones. Specifically, a pseudo labeling strategy is adopted to constantly select semantic similar images on the fly. Original labeled images will be locally replaced by the selected images for the next epoch training. In this way, the model can directly learn new semantic information from unlabeled images and the capacity of supervised signals in the embedding space can be significantly enlarged. This allows the model to improve generalization and learn a better decision boundary for classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can achieve highly competitive results over existing methods on various few-shot image recognition benchmarks.