Visual-Semantic Contrastive Alignment for Few-Shot Image Classification

Abstract: Few-Shot learning aims to train and optimize a model that can adapt to unseen visual classes with only a few labeled examples. The existing few-shot learning (FSL) methods, heavily rely only on visual data, thus fail to capture the semantic attributes to learn a more generalized version of the visual concept from very few examples. However, it is a known fact that human visual learning benefits immensely from inputs from multiple modalities such as vision, language, and audio. Inspired by the human learning nature of encapsulating the existing knowledge of a visual category which is in the form of language, we introduce a contrastive alignment mechanism for visual and semantic feature vectors to learn much more generalized visual concepts for few-shot learning. Our method simply adds an auxiliary contrastive learning objective which captures the contextual knowledge of a visual category from a strong textual encoder in addition to the existing training mechanism. Hence, the approach is more generalized and can be plugged into any existing FSL method. The pre-trained semantic feature extractor (learned from a large-scale text corpora) we use in our approach provides a strong contextual prior knowledge to assist FSL. The experimental results done in popular FSL datasets show that our approach is generic in nature and provides a strong boost to the existing FSL baselines.