Learning A Linear Classifier by Transforming Feature Vectors for Few-shot Image Classification

Abstract

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable results in large-scale data domain. However, they have not performed well on few-shot image classification tasks. Here we propose a new meta-learning approach composed of an embedding network and a linear classifier learner. During the training phase, our approach (called Transformation Network) learns to learn a classifier by transforming the feature vectors produced by the embedding module. Once trained, a Transformation Network is able to classify images of new classes by the learned classifier. The ability of learning a discriminatively trained classifier could make our architecture adapt fast to new examples from unseen classes. We further describe implementation details upon the architecture convolutional networks and linear transformation operations. We demonstrate that our approach achieves improved performance on few-shot image classification tasks on two benchmarks and a self-made dataset.