Dual Adaptive Representation Alignment for Cross-domain Few-shot Learning

Abstract

Few-shot learning aims to recognize novel queries with limited support samples by learning from base knowledge. Recent progress in this setting assumes that the base knowledge and novel query samples are distributed in the same domains, which are usually infeasible for realistic applications. Toward this issue, we propose to address the cross-domain few-shot learning problem where only extremely few samples are available in target domains. Under this realistic setting, we focus on the fast adaptation capability of meta-learners by proposing an effective dual adaptive representation alignment approach. In our approach, a prototypical feature alignment is first proposed to recalibrate support instances as prototypes and reproject these prototypes with a differentiable closed-form solution. Therefore feature spaces of learned knowledge can be adaptively transformed to query spaces by the cross-instance and cross-prototype relations. Besides the feature alignment, we further present a normalized distribution alignment module, which exploits prior statistics of query samples for solving the covariant shifts among the support and query samples. With these two modules, a progressive meta-learning framework is constructed to perform the fast adaptation with extremely few-shot samples while maintaining its generalization capabilities. Experimental evidence demonstrates our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on 4 CDFSL benchmarks and 4 fine-grained cross-domain benchmarks.