Deep Embedded Clustering in Few-shot Representations (DECiFR)

Few-shot Learning has been the center of attention in the deep learning community as it can potentially address the problem of data inaccessibility. Several approaches have been proposed to learn from a few samples efficiently, nevertheless, the majority of them use a large dataset to generalize the feature representation obtained from a single or pre-defined set of backbones before adapting to novel classes. In this paper, different from prior works that use a single best-performing backbone, we present a model-agnostic framework that does not require to "decipher" which backbone is more suitable for the specific FSL task. We propose the Deep Embedded Clustering in Few-shot Representations (DECiFR) algorithm that leverages Deep Embedded Clustering (DEC) to abstract discriminative information from the best combination of features from different backbones, by simultaneously mapping and clustering feature representations using deep neural networks. Subsequently, we propose a contrastive variant of KNN to enhance the cluster separation by propagating through the samples that minimize the inter-class distance and maximize the intra-class distance. Empirical results show that our approach not only enhances the feature embeddings but also boosts the classification accuracy, approaching or surpassing state-of-the-art performance on numerous datasets.