A Metric-based Meta-learning Approach Combined Attention Mechanism and Ensemble Learning for Few-shot Learning

Abstract Meta-learning is one of the latest research directions in machine learning, which is considered to be one of the most probably ways to realize strong artificial intelligence. Meta-learning focuses on seeking solutions for machines to learn to learn like human beings do - to recognize things through only few sample data and quickly adapt to new tasks. Challenges occur in how to train an efficient machine model with limited labeled data, since the model is easily over-fitted. In this paper, we address this obvious but important problem and propose a metric-based meta-learning model, which combines attention mechanisms and ensemble learning method. In our model, we first design a dual path attention module which considers both channel attention and spatial attention module, and the attention modules have been stacked to conduct a meta-learner for few shot meta-learning. Then, we apply an ensemble method called snap-shot ensemble to the attention-based meta-learner in order to generate more models in a single episode. Features abstracted from the models are put into the metric-based architecture to compute a prototype for each class. Our proposed method intensifies the feature extracting ability of backbone network in meta-learner and reduces over-fitting through ensemble learning and metric learning method. Experimental results toward several meta-learning datasets show that our approach is effective.