Enhancing few-shot image classification through learnable multi-scale embedding and attention mechanisms

Area of Science:

• Machine Learning
• Computer Vision

Background:

• Few-shot classification aims to train models with limited data, a challenge for traditional metric-based methods.
• Existing methods often overlook shallow features by relying on single distance values.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel approach for few-shot classification that overcomes limitations of traditional methods.
• To enhance feature representation by capturing both global and abstract features at different stages.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a multi-output embedding network to map samples into distinct feature spaces.
• Incorporated a self-attention mechanism for feature refinement at each stage.
• Employed learnable weights for each feature extraction stage.

Main Results:

• Achieved high accuracy on MiniImageNet and FC100 datasets in 5-way 1-shot and 5-way 5-shot scenarios.
• Demonstrated strong performance on cross-domain tasks across eight benchmark datasets.
• Outperformed state-of-the-art approaches in few-shot classification tasks.

Conclusions:

• The proposed multi-output embedding network with self-attention and learnable weights significantly improves few-shot classification performance.
• The method effectively captures diverse features, leading to robust representations and superior accuracy.
• This approach offers a promising direction for few-shot learning research.