The focus of recent meta-learning research has been on the development of learning algorithms that can quickly adapt to test time tasks with limited data and low computational cost. Few-shot learning is widely used as one of the standard benchmarks in meta-learning. In this work, we show that a simple baseline: learning a supervised or self-supervised representation on the meta-training set, followed by training a linear classifier on top of this representation, outperforms state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods. An additional boost can be achieved through the use of self-distillation. This demonstrates that using a good learned embedding model can be more effective than sophisticated meta-learning algorithms. We believe that our findings motivate a rethinking of few-shot image classification benchmarks and the associated role of meta-learning algorithms. Code is available at: http://github.com/WangYueFt/rfs/.

本研究提出，以meta-training data为基础，先学习一个监督或自我监督的表征，再在表征上训练线性分类器，可以优于现有的few-shot learning方法。自教学技术可以进一步改善。这表明好的学习嵌入模型比复杂的元学习算法更有效。

重新思考少样本图像分类：一个好的嵌入就足矣？