MetaDT: Meta Decision Tree for Interpretable Few-Shot Learning

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) is a challenging task, which aims to recognize novel classes with few examples. Recently, lots of methods have been proposed from the perspective of meta-learning and representation learning for improving FSL performance. However, few works focus on the interpretability of FSL decision process. In this paper, we take a step towards the interpretable FSL by proposing a novel decision tree-based meta-learning framework, namely, MetaDT. Our insight is replacing the last black-box FSL classifier of the existing representation learning methods by an interpretable decision tree with meta-learning. The key challenge is how to effectively learn the decision tree (i.e., the tree structure and the parameters of each node) in the FSL setting. To address the challenge, we introduce a tree-like class hierarchy as our prior: 1) the hierarchy is directly employed as the tree structure; 2) by regarding the class hierarchy as an undirected graph, a graph convolution-based decision tree inference network is designed as our meta-learner to learn to infer the parameters of each node. At last, a two-loop optimization mechanism is incorporated into our framework for a fast adaptation of the decision tree with few examples. Extensive experiments on performance comparison and interpretability analysis show the effectiveness and superiority of our MetaDT. Our code will be publicly available upon acceptance.