Few-Shot Learning via Task-Aware Discriminant Local Descriptors Network

Abstract

Few-shot learning for image classification task aims to classify images from several novel classes with limited number of samples. Recent studies have shown that the deep local descriptors have better representation ability than image-level features, and achieve great success. However, most of these methods often use all local descriptors or over-screening local descriptors for classification. The former contains some task-irrelevant descriptors, which may misguide the final classification result. The latter is likely to lose some key descriptors. In this paper, we propose a novel Task-Aware Discriminant local descriptors Network (TADNet) to address these issues, which can adaptively select the discriminative query descriptors and eliminate the task-irrelevant query descriptors among the entire task. Specifically, TADNet assigns a value to each query descriptor by comparing its similarity to all support classes to represent its discriminant power for classification. Then the discriminative query descriptors can be preserved via a task-aware attention map. Extensive experiments on both fine-grained and generalized datasets demonstrate that the proposed TADNet outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.