Few-Shot Classification on Unseen Domains by Learning Disparate Modulators

Although few-shot learning studies have advanced rapidly with the help of meta-learning, their practical applicability is still limited because most of them assumed that all meta-training and meta-testing examples came from the same domain. Leveraging meta-learning on multiple heterogeneous domains, we propose a few-shot classification method which adapts to novel domains as well as novel classes, which is believed to be more practical in the real world. To address this challenging problem, we start from building a pool of multiple embedding models. Inspired by multi-task learning techniques, we design each model to have its own per-layer modulator with a base network shared by others. This allows the pool to have representational diversity as a whole without losing beneficial domain-invariant features. Experimental results show that our framework can be utilized effectively for few-shot learning on unseen domains by learning to select the best model or averaging all models in the pool. Additionally, ours outperform previous methods in few-shot classification tasks on multiple seen domains.