Semi-Supervised and Active Few-Shot Learning with Prototypical Networks

Abstract: We consider the problem of semi-supervised few-shot classification where a classifier needs to adapt to new tasks using a few labeled examples and (potentially many) unlabeled examples. We propose a clustering approach to the problem. The features extracted with Prototypical Networks are clustered using $K$-means with the few labeled examples guiding the clustering process. We note that in many real-world applications the adaptation performance can be significantly improved by requesting the few labels through user feedback. We demonstrate good performance of the active adaptation strategy using image data.