In this paper, we present a novel approach termed Prompt-Driven Feature Diffusion (PDFD) within a semi-supervised learning framework for Open World Semi-Supervised Learning (OW-SSL). At its core, PDFD deploys an efficient feature-level diffusion model with the guidance of class-specific prompts to support discriminative feature representation learning and feature generation, tackling the challenge of the non-availability of labeled data for unseen classes in OW-SSL. In particular, PDFD utilizes class prototypes as prompts in the diffusion model, leveraging their class-discriminative and semantic generalization ability to condition and guide the diffusion process across all the seen and unseen classes. Furthermore, PDFD incorporates a class-conditional adversarial loss for diffusion model training, ensuring that the features generated via the diffusion process can be discriminatively aligned with the class-conditional features of the real data. Additionally, the class prototypes of the unseen classes are computed using only unlabeled instances with confident predictions within a semi-supervised learning framework. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed PDFD. The empirical results show PDFD exhibits remarkable performance enhancements over many state-of-the-art existing methods.
Due to the availability of only a few labeled instances for the novel target prediction task and the significant domain shift between the well annotated source domain and the target domain, cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL) induces a very challenging adaptation problem. In this paper, we propose a simple Adaptive Weighted Co-Learning (AWCoL) method to address the CDFSL challenge by adapting two independently trained source prototypical classification models to the target task in a weighted co-learning manner. The proposed method deploys a weighted moving average prediction strategy to generate probabilistic predictions from each model, and then conducts adaptive co-learning by jointly fine-tuning the two models in an alternating manner based on the pseudo-labels and instance weights produced from the predictions. Moreover, a negative pseudo-labeling regularizer is further deployed to improve the fine-tuning process by penalizing false predictions. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on multiple benchmark datasets and the empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method produces state-of-the-art CDFSL performance.
Cross-domain few-shot classification induces a much more challenging problem than its in-domain counterpart due to the existence of domain shifts between the training and test tasks. In this paper, we develop a novel Adaptive Parametric Prototype Learning (APPL) method under the meta-learning convention for cross-domain few-shot classification. Different from existing prototypical few-shot methods that use the averages of support instances to calculate the class prototypes, we propose to learn class prototypes from the concatenated features of the support set in a parametric fashion and meta-learn the model by enforcing prototype-based regularization on the query set. In addition, we fine-tune the model in the target domain in a transductive manner using a weighted-moving-average self-training approach on the query instances. We conduct experiments on multiple cross-domain few-shot benchmark datasets. The empirical results demonstrate that APPL yields superior performance than many state-of-the-art cross-domain few-shot learning methods.