Few-shot classification aims to learn a classifier to recognize unseen classes during training with limited labeled examples. While significant progress has been made, the growing complexity of network designs, meta-learning algorithms, and differences in implementation details make a fair comparison difficult. In this paper, we present 1) a consistent comparative analysis of several representative few-shot classification algorithms, with results showing that deeper backbones significantly reduce the performance differences among methods on datasets with limited domain differences, 2) a modified baseline method that surprisingly achieves competitive performance when compared with the state-of-the-art on both the \miniI and the CUB datasets, and 3) a new experimental setting for evaluating the cross-domain generalization ability for few-shot classification algorithms. Our results reveal that reducing intra-class variation is an important factor when the feature backbone is shallow, but not as critical when using deeper backbones. In a realistic cross-domain evaluation setting, we show that a baseline method with a standard fine-tuning practice compares favorably against other state-of-the-art few-shot learning algorithms.

这篇论文介绍了几种代表性的few-shot分类算法的一致性比较分析，包括修改的基准线方法，新的评估设置等，并揭示了在 backbones网络较深时，减少类内变异是一个重要的因素，但与使用较浅的backbones网络时不太重要的结论。在现实的跨域评估设置中，我们展示了一种标准的微调实践的基准方法与其他最先进的few-shot学习算法相比的优越性。

Few-shot分类的深入探究