Task Cooperation for Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning

Abstract Training a model with limited data is an essential task for machine learning and visual recognition. Few-shot learning approaches meta-learn a task-level inductive bias from SEEN class few-shot tasks, and the meta-model is expected to facilitate the few-shot learning with UNSEEN classes. Inspired by the idea that unlabeled data can be utilized to smooth the model space in traditional semi-supervised learning, we propose TAsk COoperation (TACO) which takes advantage of unsupervised tasks to smooth the meta-model space. Specifically, we couple the labeled support set in a few-shot task with easily-collected unlabeled instances, prediction agreement on which encodes the relationship between tasks. The learned smooth meta-model promotes the generalization ability on supervised UNSEEN few-shot tasks. The state-of-the-art few-shot classification results on MiniImageNet and TieredImageNet verify the superiority of TACO to leverage unlabeled data and task relationship in meta-learning.