Effect of Probabilistic Similarity Measure on Metric-Based Few-Shot Classification

In developing a few-shot classification model using deep networks, the limited number of samples in each class causes difficulty in utilizing statistical characteristics of the class distributions. In this paper, we propose a method to treat this difficulty by combining a probabilistic similarity based on intra-class statistics with a metric-based few-shot classification model. Noting that the probabilistic similarity estimated from intra-class statistics and the classifier of conventional few-shot classification models have a common assumption on the class distributions, we propose to apply the probabilistic similarity to obtain loss value for episodic learning of embedding network as well as to classify unseen test data. By defining the probabilistic similarity as the probability density of difference vectors between two samples with the same class label, it is possible to obtain a more reliable estimate of the similarity especially for the case of large number of classes. Through experiments on various benchmark data, we confirm that the probabilistic similarity can improve the classification performance, especially when the number of classes is large.