Few-shot learning and self-supervised learning address different facets of the same problem: how to train a model with little or no labeled data. Few-shot learning aims for optimization methods and models that can learn efficiently to recognize patterns in the low data regime. Self-supervised learning focuses instead on unlabeled data and looks into it for the supervisory signal to feed high capacity deep neural networks. In this work we exploit the complementarity of these two domains and propose an approach for improving few-shot learning through self-supervision. We use self-supervision as an auxiliary task in a few-shot learning pipeline, enabling feature extractors to learn richer and more transferable visual representations while still using few annotated samples. Through self-supervision, our approach can be naturally extended towards using diverse unlabeled data from other datasets in the few-shot setting. We report consistent improvements across an array of architectures, datasets and self-supervision techniques.

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Training deep neural networks from few examples is a highly challenging and key problem for many computer vision tasks. In this context, we are targeting knowledge transfer from a set with abundant data to other sets with few available examples. We propose two simple and effective solutions: (i) dense classification over feature maps, which for the first time studies local activations in the domain of few-shot learning, and (ii) implanting, that is, attaching new neurons to a previously trained network to learn new, taskspecific features. On miniImageNet, we improve the prior state-of-the-art on few-shot classification, i.e., we achieve 62.5%, 79.8% and 83.8% on 5-way 1-shot, 5-shot and 10shot settings respectively. 1 We use the notation [i] := {1, . . . , i} for i ∈ N.

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