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.
By Alejandro Galan-Cuenca, Marcelo Saval-Calvo, Antonio Javier Gallego
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:2606. 15134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched.
By Shubhang Bhatnagar, Dheeraj Baiju, Narendra Ahuja
ReVisIT is a train‑free framework that turns retrieved image‑label pairs into units of visual thought, combining structured class definitions, multimodal retrieval, and alternating user/assistant injection before joint decoding. On several benchmarks—including Fast Open MiniImageNet, Bongard‑OpenWorld, and the newly released MAAC‑Bench—ReVisIT achieves performance comparable to or surpassing large, trained models while using far fewer parameters. The approach demonstrates that high‑quality retrieval and a simple turns layer can provide a universal performance boost across diverse multimodal tasks.
By Bingchen Huang, Zhiling Wang, Yifu Chen, Yuanchao Du
JEPAMatch introduces a new semi‑supervised learning framework that replaces traditional output‑thresholding with explicit geometric shaping of latent representations. By combining the FlexMatch loss with a latent‑space regularization inspired by LeJEPA, the method encourages isotropic Gaussian structure in the embedding space, mitigating class imbalance and noisy pseudo‑labels. Experiments on CIFAR‑100, STL‑10, and Tiny‑ImageNet show consistent performance gains and faster convergence compared to existing FixMatch‑based baselines.
By Ali Aghababaei-Harandi, Aude Sportisse, Massih-Reza Amini
arXiv:2609.22323v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Few-shot learning research is predominantly evaluated on accuracy alone, with limited attention to the parameter and training-sample budgets required...
By Neeraj Yadav
arXiv:2608. 18339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities yet remain sensitive to real-world distribution shifts during inference.
By Qi Yu, Zhichen Zeng, Katherine Tieu, Xiyuan Yang, Ruizhong Qiu, Yuchen Yan, Lihui Liu, Yanjun Zhao, Lingjie Chen, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
arXiv:2605. 29539v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language foundation models have shown promising zero-shot generalization for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD).
By Jiacong Liu, Shu Luo, Yikai Qin, Yaze Zhao, Yongwei Jiang, Yixiong Zou
The paper introduces the Within-Instance Prototypical Transformer (WIPT), a method that performs single-query test-time prototype adaptation by jointly transforming an unlabelled query with labelled support embeddings to form query-specific class means. Using a frozen ViT-S/16 encoder trained on miniImageNet and evaluated on CUB, EuroSAT, and ISIC, WIPT improves 1‑shot performance on CUB and EuroSAT but not on ISIC, while in 5‑shot settings it outperforms a support‑only Transformer on ISIC but remains weaker than ProtoNet overall. The study also explores multi‑query processing, memory and latency trade‑offs, and analyzes how WIPT alters uncertain versus confident predictions, concluding that the method offers a streaming‑compatible test‑time adaptation that can enhance low‑shot cross‑domain decisions without target‑time optimization.
By Rushab Rasik Karania, Tomas Maul
The paper introduces PromptCCZSL, a framework that enables vision‑language models to continually learn new attributes, objects, and their unique compositions while avoiding forgetting. It uses a frozen VLM backbone with prompt‑based techniques, recency‑weighted multi‑teacher distillation, and several loss functions (CAL, OPL, IDL) to maintain prior knowledge and promote diverse, distinct embeddings. Experiments on UT‑Zappos and C‑GQA show significant performance gains over existing VLM‑based and non‑VLM baselines, establishing a new benchmark for continual compositional zero‑shot learning.
By Sauda Maryam, Sara Nadeem, Faisal Qureshi, Mohsen Ali
arXiv:2512. 10244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Semi-supervised few-shot learning (SSFSL) resembles real-world applications such as auto-annotation, as it aims to learn a model from a few labeled and abundant unlabeled task-specific examples to annotate the unlabeled ones.
By Tian Liu, Anwesha Basu, James Caverlee, Shu Kong
Adapting CLIP for zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR) via prompt learning faces a fundamental tension: the model must bridge the sketch-photo domain gap through task-specific adaptation, yet the added flexibility risks overfitting to seen training categories and eroding CLIP's zero-shot generalization. We present SeCo-SBIR, a semantically consistent prompt learning framework that resolves this tension from both sides.