Adaptive subspaces for few-shot learning

Object recognition requires a generalization capability to avoid overfitting, especially when the samples are extremely few. Generalization from limited samples, usually studied under the umbrella of meta-learning, equips learning techniques with the ability to adapt quickly in dynamical environments and proves to be an essential aspect of life long learning. In this paper, we provide a framework for few-shot learning by introducing dynamic classifiers that are constructed from few samples. A subspace method is exploited as the central block of a dynamic classifier. We will empirically show that such modelling leads to robustness against perturbations (e.g., outliers) and yields competitive results on the task of supervised and semi-supervised few-shot classification. We also develop a discriminative form which can boost the accuracy even further. Our code is available at https://github.com/chrysts/dsn_fewshot