Improving Cross-domain Few-shot Classification with Multilayer Perceptron

Cross-domain few-shot classification (CDFSC) is a challenging and tough task due to the significant distribution discrepancies across different domains. To address this challenge, many approaches aim to learn transferable representations. Multilayer perceptron (MLP) has shown its capability to learn transferable representations in various downstream tasks, such as unsupervised image classification and supervised concept generalization. However, its potential in the few-shot settings has yet to be comprehensively explored. In this study, we investigate the potential of MLP to assist in addressing the challenges of CDFSC. Specifically, we introduce three distinct frameworks incorporating MLP in accordance with three types of few-shot classification methods to verify the effectiveness of MLP. We reveal that MLP can significantly enhance discriminative capabilities and alleviate distribution shifts, which can be supported by our expensive experiments involving 10 baseline models and 12 benchmark datasets. Furthermore, our method even compares favorably against other state-of-the-art CDFSC algorithms.

Prompt-based Distribution Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Recently, despite the unprecedented success of large pre-trained visual-language models (VLMs) on a wide range of downstream tasks, the real-world unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) problem is still not well explored. Therefore, in this paper, we first experimentally demonstrate that the unsupervised-trained VLMs can significantly reduce the distribution discrepancy between source and target domains, thereby improving the performance of UDA. However, a major challenge for directly deploying such models on downstream UDA tasks is prompt engineering, which requires aligning the domain knowledge of source and target domains, since the performance of UDA is severely influenced by a good domain-invariant representation. We further propose a Prompt-based Distribution Alignment (PDA) method to incorporate the domain knowledge into prompt learning. Specifically, PDA employs a two-branch prompt-tuning paradigm, namely base branch and alignment branch. The base branch focuses on integrating class-related representation into prompts, ensuring discrimination among different classes. To further minimize domain discrepancy, for the alignment branch, we construct feature banks for both the source and target domains and propose image-guided feature tuning (IFT) to make the input attend to feature banks, which effectively integrates self-enhanced and cross-domain features into the model. In this way, these two branches can be mutually promoted to enhance the adaptation of VLMs for UDA. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmarks to demonstrate that our proposed PDA achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/BaiShuanghao/Prompt-based-Distribution-Alignment.