A Theoretical Analysis of the Number of Shots in Few-Shot Learning

Few-shot classification is the task of predicting the category of an example from a set of few labeled examples. The number of labeled examples per category is called the number of shots (or shot number). Recent works tackle this task through meta-learning, where a meta-learner extracts information from observed tasks during meta-training to quickly adapt to new tasks during meta-testing. In this formulation, the number of shots exploited during meta-training has an impact on the recognition performance at meta-test time. Generally, the shot number used in meta-training should match the one used in meta-testing to obtain the best performance. We introduce a theoretical analysis of the impact of the shot number on Prototypical Networks, a state-of-the-art few-shot classification method. From our analysis, we propose a simple method that is robust to the choice of shot number used during meta-training, which is a crucial hyperparameter. The performance of our model trained for an arbitrary meta-training shot number shows great performance for different values of meta-testing shot numbers. We experimentally demonstrate our approach on different few-shot classification benchmarks.

Centroid-based deep metric learning for speaker recognition

Speaker embedding models that utilize neural networks to map utterances to a space where distances reflect similarity between speakers have driven recent progress in the speaker recognition task. However, there is still a significant performance gap between recognizing speakers in the training set and unseen speakers. The latter case corresponds to the few-shot learning task, where a trained model is evaluated on unseen classes. Here, we optimize a speaker embedding model with prototypical network loss (PNL), a state-of-the-art approach for the few-shot image classification task. The resulting embedding model outperforms the state-of-the-art triplet loss based models in both speaker verification and identification tasks, for both seen and unseen speakers.