Low-shot learning and class imbalance: a survey

Abstract

The tasks of few-shot, one-shot, and zero-shot learning—or collectively “low-shot learning” (LSL)—at first glance are quite similar to the long-standing task of class imbalanced learning; specifically, they aim to learn classes for which there is little labeled data available. Motivated by this similarity, we conduct a survey to review the recent literature for works which combine these fields in one of two ways, either addressing the obstacle of class imbalance within a LSL setting, or utilizing LSL techniques or frameworks in order to combat class imbalance within other settings. In our survey of over 60 papers in a wide range of applications from January 2020 to July 2023 (inclusive), we examine and report methodologies and experimental results, find that most works report performance at or above their respective state-of-the-art, and highlight current research gaps which hold potential for future work, especially those involving the use of LSL techniques in imbalanced tasks. To this end, we emphasize the lack of works utilizing LSL approaches based on large language models or semantic data, and works using LSL for big-data imbalanced tasks.