Superclass-Conditional Gaussian Mixture Model for Coarse-To-Fine Few-Shot Learning

Publication Date: 4/29/2022

Event: 10th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2022)

Reference: pp. 1-20, 2022

Authors: Jingchao Ni, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Wei Cheng, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Zhengzhang Chen, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Takayoshi Asakura, Secure System Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation; Tomoya Soma, Secure System Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation; Sho Kato, Renascience Inc.; Haifeng Chen, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.

Abstract: Learning fine-grained embeddings is essential for extending the generalizability of models pre-trained on “coarse” labels (e.g., animals). It is crucial to fields for which fine-grained labeling (e.g., breeds of animals) is expensive, but fine-grained prediction is desirable, such as medicine. The dilemma necessitates adaptation of a “coarsely” pre-trained model to new tasks with a few “finer-grained” training labels. However, coarsely supervised pre-training tends to suppress intra-class variation, which is vital for cross-granularity adaptation. In this paper, we develop a training framework underlain by a novel superclass-conditional Gaussian mixture model (SCGM). SCGM imitates the generative process of samples from hierarchies of classes through latent variable modeling of the fine-grained subclasses. The framework is agnostic to the encoders and only adds a few distribution related parameters, thus is efficient, and flexible to different domains. The model parameters are learned end-to-end by maximum-likelihood estimation via a principled Expectation-Maximization algorithm. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets and a real-life medical dataset indicate the effectiveness of our method.

Publication Link: https://openreview.net/forum?id=vds4SNooOe