Towards Understanding the Cause of Error in Few-Shot Learning

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) is a challenging task of recognizing novel classes from scarce labeled samples. Many existing researches focus on learning good representations that generalize well to new categories. However, given low-data regime, the restricting factors of performance on novel classes has not been well studied. In this paper, our objective is to understand the cause of error in few-shot classification, as well as exploring the upper limit of error rate. We first introduce and derive a theoretical upper bound of error rate which is constrained to 1) linear separability in the learned embedding space and 2) discrepancy of task-specific and task-independent classifier. Quantitative experiment is conducted and results show that the error in FSL is dominantly caused by classifier discrepancy. We further propose a simple method to confirm our theoretical analysis and observation. The method adds a constraint to reduce classifier discrepancy so as to lower the upper bound of error rate. Experiments on three benchmarks with different base learners verify the effectiveness of our method. It shows that decreasing classifier discrepancy can consistently achieve improvements in most cases.