Charting the Right Manifold: Manifold Mixup for Few-shot Learning

Puneet Mangla1
Mayank Singh2
Abhishek Sinha2
Nupur Kumari2
Vineeth N Balasubramanian1
Balaji Krishnamurthy2
1IIT Hyderabad
2Media and Data Science Research Lab Adobe
Proceedings of IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV'20)

Abstract

Few-shot learning algorithms aim to learn model parameters capable of adapting to unseen classes with the help of only a few labeled examples. A recent regularization technique - Manifold Mixup focuses on learning a general-purpose representation, robust to small changes in the data distribution. Since the goal of few-shot learning is closely linked to robust representation learning, we study Manifold Mixup in this problem setting. Self-supervised learning is another technique that learns semantically meaningful features, using only the inherent structure of the data. This work investigates the role of learning relevant feature manifold for few-shot tasks using self-supervision and regularization techniques. We observe that regularizing the feature manifold, enriched via self-supervised techniques, with Manifold Mixup significantly improves few-shot learning performance. We show that our proposed method S2M2 beats the current state-of-the-art accuracy on standard few-shot learning datasets like CIFAR-FS, CUB, mini-ImageNet and tiered-ImageNet by 3-8 %. Through extensive experimentation, we show that the features learned using our approach generalize to complex few-shot evaluation tasks, cross-domain scenarios and are robust against slight changes to data distribution.


Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Ministry of Human Resource Development, India.....


Contact

If you have any questions about this work, please contact us at cs17btech11029@iith.ac.in