Simple Semantic-Aided Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Hai Zhang, Junzhe Xu, Shanlin Jiang, Zhenan He

Learning from a limited amount of data namely Few-Shot Learning stands out as a challenging computer vision task. Several works exploit semantics and design complicated semantic fusion mechanisms to compensate for rare representative features within restricted data. However relying on naive semantics such as class names introduces biases due to their brevity while acquiring extensive semantics from external knowledge takes a huge time and effort. This limitation severely constrains the potential of semantics in Few-Shot Learning. In this paper we design an automatic way called Semantic Evolution to generate high-quality semantics. The incorporation of high-quality semantics alleviates the need for complex network structures and learning algorithms used in previous works. Hence we employ a simple two-layer network termed Semantic Alignment Network to transform semantics and visual features into robust class prototypes with rich discriminative features for few-shot classification. The experimental results show our framework outperforms all previous methods on six benchmarks demonstrating a simple network with high-quality semantics can beat intricate multi-modal modules on few-shot classification tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangdoudou123/SemFew.