Survey on Few-shot Learning

Few-shot learning is defined as learning models to solve problems from small samples. In recent years, under the trend of training model with big data, machine learning and deep learning have achieved success in many fields. However, in many application scenarios in the real world, there is not a large amount of data or labeled data for model training, and labeling a large number of unlabeled samples will cost a lot of manpower. Therefore, how to use a small number of samples for learning has become a problem that needs to be paid attention to at present. This paper systematically combs the current approaches of few-shot learning. It introduces each kind of corresponding model from the three categories: fine-tune based, data augmentation based, and transfer learning based. Then, the data augmentation based approaches are subdivided into unlabeled data based, data generation based, and feature augmentation based approaches. The transfer learning based approaches are subdivided into metric learning based, meta-learning based, and graph neural network based methods. In the following, the paper summarizes the few-shot datasets and the results in the experiments of the aforementioned models. Next, the paper summarizes the current situation and challenges in few-shot learning. Finally, the future technological development of few-shot learning is prospected. © Copyright 2021, Institute of Software, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.