Few-shot learning algorithms aim to learn model parameters capable of adapting to unseen classes with the help of only a few labeled examples. A recent regularization technique - Manifold Mixup focuses on learning a general-purpose representation, robust to small changes in the data distribution. Since the goal of few-shot learning is closely linked to robust representation learning, we study Manifold Mixup in this problem setting. Self-supervised learning is another technique that learns semantically meaningful features, using only the inherent structure of the data. This work investigates the role of learning relevant feature manifold for few-shot tasks using self-supervision and regularization techniques. We observe that regularizing the feature manifold, enriched via self-supervised techniques, with Manifold Mixup significantly improves few-shot learning performance. We show that our proposed method S2M2 beats the current state-of-the-art accuracy on standard few-shot learning datasets like CIFAR-FS, CUB and mini-ImageNet by 3-8 . Through extensive experimentation, we show that the features learned using our approach generalize to complex few-shot evaluation tasks, cross-domain scenarios and are robust against slight changes to data distribution.
@cite_13: Current methods for training convolutional neural networks depend on large amounts of labeled samples for supervised training. In this paper we present an approach for training a convolutional neural network using only unlabeled data. We train the network to discriminate between a set of surrogate classes. Each surrogate class is formed by applying a variety of transformations to a randomly sampled 'seed' image patch. We find that this simple feature learning algorithm is surprisingly successful when applied to visual object recognition. The feature representation learned by our algorithm achieves classification results matching or outperforming the current state-of-the-art for unsupervised learning on several popular datasets (STL-10, CIFAR-10, Caltech-101).
@cite_67: 
@cite_37: We present an unsupervised visual feature learning algorithm driven by context-based pixel prediction. By analogy with auto-encoders, we propose Context Encoders – a convolutional neural network trained to generate the contents of an arbitrary image region conditioned on its surroundings. In order to succeed at this task, context encoders need to both understand the content of the entire image, as well as produce a plausible hypothesis for the missing part(s). When training context encoders, we have experimented with both a standard pixel-wise reconstruction loss, as well as a reconstruction plus an adversarial loss. The latter produces much sharper results because it can better handle multiple modes in the output. We found that a context encoder learns a representation that captures not just appearance but also the semantics of visual structures. We quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned features for CNN pre-training on classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. Furthermore, context encoders can be used for semantic inpainting tasks, either stand-alone or as initialization for non-parametric methods.
@cite_32: In this paper, we explore methods of complicating selfsupervised tasks for representation learning. That is, we do severe damage to data and encourage a network to recover them. First, we complicate each of three powerful self-supervised task candidates: jigsaw puzzle, inpainting, and colorization. In addition, we introduce a novel complicated self-supervised task called "Completing damaged jigsaw puzzles" which is puzzles with one piece missing and the other pieces without color. We train a convolutional neural network not only to solve the puzzles, but also generate the missing content and colorize the puzzles. The recovery of the aforementioned damage pushes the network to obtain robust and general-purpose representations. We demonstrate that complicating the self-supervised tasks improves their original versions and that our final task learns more robust and transferable representations compared to the previous methods, as well as the simple combination of our candidate tasks. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in transfer learning on PASCAL classification and semantic segmentation.
@cite_6: We propose a novel unsupervised learning approach to build features suitable for object detection and classification. The features are pre-trained on a large dataset without human annotation and later transferred via fine-tuning on a different, smaller and labeled dataset. The pre-training consists of solving jigsaw puzzles of natural images. To facilitate the transfer of features to other tasks, we introduce the context-free network (CFN), a siamese-ennead convolutional neural network. The features correspond to the columns of the CFN and they process image tiles independently (i.e., free of context). The later layers of the CFN then use the features to identify their geometric arrangement. Our experimental evaluations show that the learned features capture semantically relevant content. We pre-train the CFN on the training set of the ILSVRC2012 dataset and transfer the features on the combined training and validation set of Pascal VOC 2007 for object detection (via fast RCNN) and classification. These features outperform all current unsupervised features with (51.8 , ) for detection and (68.6 , ) for classification, and reduce the gap with supervised learning ( (56.5 , ) and (78.2 , ) respectively).
@cite_46: We propose split-brain autoencoders, a straightforward modification of the traditional autoencoder architecture, for unsupervised representation learning. The method adds a split to the network, resulting in two disjoint sub-networks. Each sub-network is trained to perform a difficult task &#x2013; predicting one subset of the data channels from another. Together, the sub-networks extract features from the entire input signal. By forcing the network to solve cross-channel prediction tasks, we induce a representation within the network which transfers well to other, unseen tasks. This method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several large-scale transfer learning benchmarks.
@cite_10: Given a grayscale photograph as input, this paper attacks the problem of hallucinating a plausible color version of the photograph. This problem is clearly underconstrained, so previous approaches have either relied on significant user interaction or resulted in desaturated colorizations. We propose a fully automatic approach that produces vibrant and realistic colorizations. We embrace the underlying uncertainty of the problem by posing it as a classification task and use class-rebalancing at training time to increase the diversity of colors in the result. The system is implemented as a feed-forward pass in a CNN at test time and is trained on over a million color images. We evaluate our algorithm using a “colorization Turing test,” asking human participants to choose between a generated and ground truth color image. Our method successfully fools humans on 32 of the trials, significantly higher than previous methods. Moreover, we show that colorization can be a powerful pretext task for self-supervised feature learning, acting as a cross-channel encoder. This approach results in state-of-the-art performance on several feature learning benchmarks.
Some of the pretext tasks also work by enforcing constraints on the representation of the feature. A prominent example is the exemplar loss from @cite_13 that promotes representation of image to be invariant to image augmentations. Additionally, some research effort have also been put in to define the pretext task as a combination of multiple pretext task @cite_67 @cite_32 . For instance, in @cite_32 representation learning is augmented with pretext tasks of jigsaw puzzle @cite_6 ,colorization @cite_10 @cite_46 and in-painting @cite_37 .