Graph convolution network with node feature optimization using cross attention for few-shot learning

Graph convolution network (GCN) is an important method recently developed for few-shot learning. The adjacency matrix in GCN models is constructed based on graph node features to represent the graph node relationships, according to which, the graph network achieves message-passing inference. Therefore, the representation ability of graph node features is an important factor affecting the learning performance of GCN. This paper proposes an improved GCN model with node feature optimization using cross attention, named GCN-NFO. Leveraging on cross attention mechanism to associate the image features of support set and query set, the proposed model extracts more representative and discriminative salient region features as initialization features of graph nodes through information aggregation. Since graph network can represent the relationship between samples, the optimized graph node features transmit information through the graph network, thus implicitly enhances the similarity of intra-class samples and the dissimilarity of inter-class samples, thus enhancing the learning capability of GCN. Intensive experimental results on image classification task using different image datasets prove that GCN-NFO is an effective few-shot learning algorithm which significantly improves the classification accuracy, compared with other existing models.