Meta-learning has been the most common framework for few-shot learning in recent years. It learns the model from collections of few-shot classification tasks, which is believed to have a key advantage of making the training objective consistent with the testing objective. However, some recent works report that by training for whole-classification, i.e. classification on the whole label-set, it can get comparable or even better embedding than many meta-learning algorithms. The edge between these two lines of works has yet been underexplored, and the effectiveness of meta-learning in few-shot learning remains unclear. In this paper, we explore a simple process: meta-learning over a whole-classification pre-trained model on its evaluation metric. We observe this simple method achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks. Our further analysis shed some light on understanding the trade-offs between the meta-learning objective and the whole-classification objective in few-shot learning.
@article{arxiv.2003.04390,
title = {Meta-Baseline: Exploring Simple Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Learning},
author = {Yinbo Chen and Zhuang Liu and Huijuan Xu and Trevor Darrell and Xiaolong Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.04390},
year = {2021}
}