Local Contrast Learning for One-Shot Learning

Learning a deep model from small data is an opening and challenging problem. In high-dimensional spaces, few samples only occupy an extremely small portion of the space, often exhibiting sparsity issues. Classifying in this globally sparse sample space poses significant challenges. However, by using a single sample category as a reference object for comparing and recognizing other samples, it is possible to construct a local space. Conducting contrastive learning in this local space can overcome the sparsity issue of a few samples. Based on this insight, we proposed a novel deep learning approach named Local Contrast Learning (LCL). This is analogous to a key insight into human cognitive behavior, where humans identify the objects in a specific context by contrasting them with the objects in that context or from their memory. LCL is used to train a deep model that can contrast the recognized sample with a couple of contrastive samples that are randomly drawn and shuffled. On a one-shot classification task on Omniglot, the deep model-based LCL with 86 layers and 1.94 million parameters, which was trained on a tiny dataset with only 60 classes and 20 samples per class, achieved an accuracy of 98.95%. Furthermore, it achieved an accuracy of 99.24% at 156 classes and 20 samples per class. LCL is a fundamental idea that can be applied to alleviate the parametric model’s overfitting resulting from a lack of training samples.