{Zhi-Hong Deng Haoqing Wang}

Abstract

Unsupervised few-shot learning aims to learn the inductive bias from unlabeled dataset for solving the novel few-shot tasks. The existing unsupervised few-shot learning models and the contrastive learning models follow a unified paradigm. Therefore, we conduct empirical study under this paradigm and find that pairwise contrast, meta losses and large batch size are the important design factors. This results in our CPN (Contrastive Prototypical Network) model, which combines the prototypical loss with pairwise contrast and outperforms the existing models from this paradigm with modestly large batch size. Furthermore, the one-hot prediction target in CPN could lead to learning the sample-specific information. To this end, we propose Wasserstein Confidence Penalty which can impose appropriate penalty on overconfident predictions based on the semantic relationships among pseudo classes. Our full model, CPNWCP (Contrastive Prototypical Network with Wasserstein Confidence Penalty), achieves state-of-the-art performance on miniImageNet and tieredImageNet under unsupervised setting. Our code is available at https://github.com/Haoqing-Wang/CPNWCP.