Few-Shot Learning for Knowledge Engineering and Intellectual System

A special issue of Information (ISSN 2078-2489). This special issue belongs to the section "Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 28 February 2025 | Viewed by 2162

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Software Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China
Interests: deep learning; few-shot learning; knowledge discovery

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Co-Guest Editor
School of Computing, Mathematics, and Engineering, Charles Sturt University, Albury, NSW 2640, Australia
Interests: big data analysis; visualization; applied machine learning; computer applications; web services

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, deep learning, as an appealing subfield of machine learning, has been found to be able to extract representations with multiple levels of abstraction to discover intricate structures in data, having produced excellent results in knowledge engineering and intellectual systems. It has dramatically bridged the gap between machines and the human brain due to the powerful ability of representation learning. In essence, deep learning can generalize superior networks by fitting a large number of labeled data and, thus, showing the significant performance. Unfortunately, there might not be enough labeled data available in applications, which cannot guarantee the robustness and generalization of networks. The issue of labeled data scarcity poses great challenges to the intelligent development of machines.

Inspired by the impressive human ability to learn new tasks without large amounts of prior knowledge, few-shot learning was introduced to address this challenge. It utilizes specific learning paradigms to generalize knowledge in small-scale data, which can quickly adapt to novel tasks with the help of other similar tasks and alleviate the issue of labeled data scarcity. Few-shot learning provides an emerging direction for the research of machine learning, and has become a significant topic for developing learning methods for limited data. Therefore, to further promote the intelligent development of machines, there is a pressing need to study novel methods.

This Special Issue focuses on the latest developments of few-shot learning in various fields, such as computer vision, natural language processing, intelligent video recognition, etc. Our expectations regarding contributions are not confined to research concerning the theory and methodology of machine learning, but also involving the deployment of practical applications based on a few samples.

The topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following areas:

  • Few-shot learning towards computer vision.
  • Few-shot learning towards natural language processing.
  • Few-shot learning towards acoustic signal processing.
  • Application deployments of few-shot learning.
  • Theoretical studies of few-shot learning.
  • New datasets and benchmarks of few-shot learning.
  • Self-supervised learning methods.
  • Deep unsupervised learning methods.
  • Deep semisupervised learning methods.

Prof. Dr. Zhikui Chen
Dr. Xiaodi Huang
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • few-shot learning
  • unsupervised learning
  • semisupervised learning
  • intellectual system

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

28 pages, 2121 KiB  
Article
Task-Adaptive Multi-Source Representations for Few-Shot Image Recognition
by Ge Liu, Zhongqiang Zhang and Xiangzhong Fang
Information 2024, 15(6), 293; https://doi.org/10.3390/info15060293 - 21 May 2024
Viewed by 942
Abstract
Conventional few-shot learning (FSL) mainly focuses on knowledge transfer from a single source dataset to a recognition scenario with only a few training samples available but still similar to the source domain. In this paper, we consider a more practical FSL setting where [...] Read more.
Conventional few-shot learning (FSL) mainly focuses on knowledge transfer from a single source dataset to a recognition scenario with only a few training samples available but still similar to the source domain. In this paper, we consider a more practical FSL setting where multiple semantically different datasets are available to address a wide range of FSL tasks, especially for some recognition scenarios beyond natural images, such as remote sensing and medical imagery. It can be referred to as multi-source cross-domain FSL. To tackle the problem, we propose a two-stage learning scheme, termed learning and adapting multi-source representations (LAMR). In the first stage, we propose a multi-head network to obtain efficient multi-domain representations, where all source domains share the same backbone except for the last parallel projection layers for domain specialization. We train the representations in a multi-task setting where each in-domain classification task is taken by a cosine classifier. In the second stage, considering that instance discrimination and class discrimination are crucial for robust recognition, we propose two contrastive objectives for adapting the pre-trained representations to be task-specialized on the few-shot data. Careful ablation studies verify that LAMR significantly improves representation transferability, showing consistent performance boosts. We also extend LAMR to single-source FSL by introducing a dataset-splitting strategy that equally splits one source dataset into sub-domains. The empirical results show that LAMR can achieve SOTA performance on the BSCD-FSL benchmark and competitive performance on mini-ImageNet, highlighting its versatility and effectiveness for FSL of both natural and specific imaging. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Few-Shot Learning for Knowledge Engineering and Intellectual System)
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