Pseudo-loss Confidence Metric for Semi-supervised Few-shot Learning

Abstract

Semi-supervised few-shot learning is developed to train a classifier that can adapt to new tasks with limited labeled data and a fixed quantity of unlabeled data. Most semi-supervised few-shot learning methods select pseudo-labeled data of unlabeled set by task-specific confidence estimation. This work presents a task-unified confidence estimation approach for semi-supervised few-shot learning, named pseudo-loss confidence metric (PLCM). It measures the data credibility by the loss distribution of pseudo-labels, which is synthetical considered multi-tasks. Specifically, pseudo-labeled data of different tasks are mapped to a unified metric space by mean of the pseudo-loss model, making it possible to learn the prior pseudo-loss distribution. Then, confidence of pseudo-labeled data is estimated according to the distribution component confidence of its pseudo-loss. Thus highly reliable pseudo-labeled data are selected to strengthen the classifier. Moreover, to overcome the pseudo-loss distribution shift and improve the effectiveness of classifier, we advance the multi-step training strategy coordinated with the class balance measures of class-apart selection and class weight. Experimental results on four popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively select pseudo-labeled data and achieve the state-of-the-art performance.