2022/09/28 by Guoliang Lin, Lin, Guoliang, Xu, Yongheng +2
Computer Science · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #Machine Learning and ELM #Cancer-related molecular mechanisms research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2209.13816
Few-shot learning with N-way K-shot scheme is an open challenge in machine learning. Many metric-based approaches have been proposed to tackle this problem, e.g., the Matching Networks and CLIP-Adapter. Despite that these approaches have shown significant progress, the mechanism of why these methods succeed has not been well explored. In this paper, we try to interpret these metric-based few-shot learning methods via causal mechanism. We show that the existing approaches can be viewed as specific forms of front-door adjustment, which can alleviate the effect of spurious correlations and thus learn the causality. This causal interpretation could provide us a new perspective to better understand these existing metric-based methods. Further, based on this causal interpretation, we simply introduce two causal methods for metric-based few-shot learning, which considers not only the relationship between examples but also the diversity of representations. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods in few-shot classification on various benchmark datasets. Code is available in https://github.com/lingl1024/causalFewShot.