Simpler is Better: Few-shot Semantic Segmentation with Classifier Weight Transformer

A few-shot semantic segmentation model is typically composed of a CNN encoder, a CNN decoder and a simple classifier (separating foreground and background pixels). Most existing methods meta-learn all three model components for fast adaptation to a new class. However, given that as few as a single support set image is available, effective model adaption of all three components to the new class is extremely challenging. In this work we propose to simplify the meta-learning task by focusing solely on the simplest component – the classifier, whilst leaving the en-coder and decoder to pre-training. We hypothesize that if we pretrain an off-the-shelf segmentation model over a set of diverse training classes with sufficient annotations, the encoder and decoder can capture rich discriminative features applicable for any unseen classes, rendering the sub-sequent meta-learning stage unnecessary. For the classifier meta-learning, we introduce a Classifier Weight Transformer (CWT) designed to dynamically adapt the support-set trained classifier’s weights to each query image in an inductive way. Extensive experiments on two standard bench-marks show that despite its simplicity, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives, often by a large margin. Code is available on https://github.com/zhiheLu/CWT-for-FSS.