Low-Shot Learning with Imprinted Weights
Abstract
Human vision is able to immediately recognize novel visual categories after seeing just one or a few training examples. We describe how to add a similar capability to ConvNet classifiers by directly setting the final layer weights from novel training examples during low-shot learning. We call this process \emph{weight imprinting} as it directly sets penultimate layer weights based on an appropriately scaled copy of their activations for that training example. The imprinting process provides a valuable complement to training with stochastic gradient descent, as it provides immediate good classification performance and an initialization for any further fine tuning in the future. We show how this imprinting process is related to proxy-based embeddings. However, it differs in that only a single imprinted weight vector is learned for each novel category, rather than relying on a nearest-neighbor distance to training instances as typically used with embedding methods. Our experiments show that using averaging of imprinted weights provides better generalization than using nearest-neighbor instance embeddings. A key change to traditional ConvNet classifiers is the introduction of a scaled normalization layer that allows activations to be directly imprinted as weights.
Research Areas
