Masked Feature Generation Network for Few-Shot Learning

Abstract

In this paper, we present a feature-augmentation approach called Masked Feature Generation Network (MFGN) for Few-Shot Learning (FSL), a challenging task that attempts to recognize the novel classes with a few visual instances for each class. Most of the feature-augmentation approaches tackle FSL tasks via modeling the intra-class distributions. We extend this idea further to explicitly capture the intra-class variations in a one-to-many manner. Specifically, MFGN consists of an encoder-decoder architecture, with an encoder that performs as a feature extractor and extracts the feature embeddings of the available visual instances (the unavailable instances are seen to be masked), along with a decoder that performs as a feature generator and reconstructs the feature embeddings of the unavailable visual instances from both the available feature embeddings and the masked tokens. Equipped with this generative architecture, MFGN produces nontrivial visual features for the novel classes with limited visual instances. In extensive experiments on four FSL benchmarks, MFGN performs competitively and outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors on most of the few-shot classification tasks.