Efficient Meta-Learning through Task-Specific Pseudo Labelling

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Meta-learning is attracting attention as a crucial tool for few-show learning tasks. Meta-learning involves the establishment and acquisition of “meta-knowledge”, enabling the ability to adapt to a novel field using only limited data. Transductive meta-learning has garnered increasing attention as a solution to the sample bias problem arising from meta-learning’s reliance on a limited support set for adaptation. This approach surpasses the traditional inductive learning perspective, aiming to address this issue effectively. Transductive meta-learning infers the class of each instance in time by considering the relation of instances in the test set. In order to enhance the effectiveness of transductive meta-learning, this paper introduces a novel technique called task-specific pseudo labelling. The main idea is to produce synthetic labels for unannotated query sets by propagating labels from annotated support sets. This approach allows the utilization of the supervised setting as is, while incorporating the unannotated query set into the adjustment procedure. Consequently, our approach enables handling a larger number of examples during adaptation compared to inductive approaches, leading to improved classification performance of the model. Notably, this approach represents the first instance of employing task adaptation within the context of pseudo labelling. Based on the experimental outcomes in the evaluation configurations of few-shot learning, specifically in the 5-way 1-shot setup, the proposed method demonstrates noteworthy enhancements over two existing meta-learning algorithms, with improvements of 6.75% and 5.03%, respectively. Consequently, the proposed method establishes a new state-of-the-art performance in the realm of transductive meta-learning.