Task-aware Part Mining Network for Few-Shot Learning

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) aims at classifying samples into new unseen classes with only a handful of labeled samples available. However, most of the existing methods are based on the image-level pooled representation, yet ignore considerable local clues that are transferable across tasks. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end Task-aware Part Mining Network (TPMN) by integrating an automatic part mining process into the metric-based model for FSL. The proposed TPMN model enjoys several merits. First, we design a meta filter learner to generate task-aware part filters based on the task embedding in a meta-learning way. The task-aware part filters can adapt to any individual task and automatically mine task-related local parts even for an unseen task. Second, an adaptive importance generator is proposed to identify key local parts and assign adaptive importance weights to different parts. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to automatically exploit the task-aware local parts in a meta-learning way for FSL. Extensive experimental results on four standard benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed model performs favorably against state-of-the-art FSL methods.