PANet: Pluralistic Attention Network for Few-Shot Image Classification

Traditional deep learning methods require a large amount of labeled data for model training, which is laborious and costly in real word. Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to recognize novel classes with only a small number of labeled samples to address these challenges. We focus on metric-based few-shot learning with improvements in both feature extraction and metric method. In our work, we propose the Pluralistic Attention Network (PANet), a novel attention-oriented framework, involving both a local encoded intra-attention(LEIA) module and a global encoded reciprocal attention(GERA) module. The LEIA is designed to capture comprehensive local feature dependencies within every single sample. The GERA concentrates on the correlation between two samples and learns the discriminability of representations obtained from the LEIA. The two modules are complementary to each other and ensure the feature information within and between images can be fully utilized. Furthermore, we also design a dual-centralization (DC) cosine similarity to eliminate the disparity of data distribution in different dimensions and enhance the metric accuracy between support and query samples. Our method is thoroughly evaluated with extensive experiments, and the results demonstrate that with the contribution of each component, our model can achieve high-performance on four widely used few-shot classification benchmarks of miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CUB-200-2011 and CIFAR-FS.