arXiv Machine Learning

Are We Really Doing Few-Shot Learning? A Critical Examination of Pre-Training Assumptions

The paper critically evaluates common few‑shot learning protocols that rely on pre‑training a model on a large auxiliary set with classes disjoint from the target but drawn from the same visual domain. By comparing no pre‑training, class‑disjoint in‑domain pre‑training, supervised out‑of‑domain pre‑training, and label‑free out‑of‑domain pre‑training across eight datasets and three architectures, the authors find that in‑domain pre‑training yields a 33.41‑point average improvement, while out‑of‑domain pre‑training offers a 23.75‑point gain, revealing a 9.66‑point optimistic bias due to domain overlap. They also demonstrate that a label‑free augmentation strategy can match supervised out‑of‑domain performance and propose a descriptor‑based source‑selection method that closely approximates oracle selection, underscoring the need to move beyond in‑domain pre‑training as the default evaluation protocol.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 23

Training-free Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation via Robust Semantic Representation and Matching

Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to transfer knowledge learned from source domain to distinct target domains, segmenting unseen target classes with only a few annotated samples. Although existing methods have made significant progress, they still rely on training or fine-tuning processes, which incur high computational costs and risk overfitting.

arXiv AI
Jul 3

Neuron-Aware Active Few-Shot Learning for LLMs

arXiv:2607. 02423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Active Few-Shot Learning (AFSL) adapts LLMs to specialized domains by identifying the most valuable unlabeled samples for annotation and use as few-shot demonstrations, effectively reducing human annotation costs while promoting high performance.

By Zhuowei Chen, Liwei Chen, Christian Schunn, Raquel Coelho, Xiang Lorraine Li