Understanding Transductive Few-shot Learning

Image annotation can be a bottleneck for the applicability of machine learning when a costly expert annotation is needed. Some examples are medical imaging, astronomy, or botanics.

To alleviate this problem, few-shot classification aims to train classifiers from a small (few) number of samples (shot). A typical scenario is one-shot learning, with only one image per class. Another is zero-shot learning, where classes are given to the model in a different format. For instance, I could tell you “roses are red, the sky is blue” and you should be able to classify them without actually seeing any picture.

Recent works leverage unlabeled data to boost a few-shot performance. Some examples are label propagation and embedding propagation. These methods are in the “transductive” and “semi-supervised” learning (SSL) category. In this post, I will first overview the field of few-shot learning. Then I will explain transductive and SSL by using label propagation and embedding prop