XtarNet: Learning to Extract Task-Adaptive Representation for Incremental Few-Shot Learning
Sung Whan Yoon, Do-Yeon Kim, Jun Seo, Jaekyun Moon
Abstract
Learning novel concepts while preserving prior knowledge is a long-standing challenge in machine learning. The challenge gets greater when a novel task is given with only a few labeled examples, a problem known as incremental few-shot learning. We propose XtarNet, which learns to extract task-adaptive representation (TAR) for facilitating incremental few-shot learning. The method utilizes a backbone network pretrained on a set of base categories while also employing additional modules that are meta-trained across episodes. Given a new task, the novel feature extracted from the meta-trained modules is mixed with the base feature obtained from the pretrained model. The process of combining two different features provides TAR and is also controlled by meta-trained modules. The TAR contains effective information for classifying both novel and base categories. The base and novel classifiers quickly adapt to a given task by utilizing the TAR. Experiments on standard image datasets indicate that XtarNet achieves state-of-the-art incremental few-shot learning performance. The concept of TAR can also be used in conjunction with existing incremental few-shot learning methods; extensive simulation results in fact show that applying TAR enhances the known methods significantly.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v119-yoon20b,
title = {{X}tar{N}et: Learning to Extract Task-Adaptive Representation for Incremental Few-Shot Learning},
author = {Yoon, Sung Whan and Kim, Do-Yeon and Seo, Jun and Moon, Jaekyun},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {10852--10860},
year = {2020},
editor = {III, Hal Daumé and Singh, Aarti},
volume = {119},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {13--18 Jul},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/yoon20b/yoon20b.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/yoon20b.html},
abstract = {Learning novel concepts while preserving prior knowledge is a long-standing challenge in machine learning. The challenge gets greater when a novel task is given with only a few labeled examples, a problem known as incremental few-shot learning. We propose XtarNet, which learns to extract task-adaptive representation (TAR) for facilitating incremental few-shot learning. The method utilizes a backbone network pretrained on a set of base categories while also employing additional modules that are meta-trained across episodes. Given a new task, the novel feature extracted from the meta-trained modules is mixed with the base feature obtained from the pretrained model. The process of combining two different features provides TAR and is also controlled by meta-trained modules. The TAR contains effective information for classifying both novel and base categories. The base and novel classifiers quickly adapt to a given task by utilizing the TAR. Experiments on standard image datasets indicate that XtarNet achieves state-of-the-art incremental few-shot learning performance. The concept of TAR can also be used in conjunction with existing incremental few-shot learning methods; extensive simulation results in fact show that applying TAR enhances the known methods significantly.}
}