Unified View Empirical Study for Large Pretrained Model on Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

The challenge of cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL) stems from the substantial distribution disparities between target and source domain images, necessitating a model with robust generalization capabilities. In this work, we posit that large-scale pretrained models are pivotal in addressing the cross-domain few-shot learning task owing to their exceptional representational and generalization prowess. To our knowledge, no existing research comprehensively investigates the utility of large-scale pretrained models in the cross-domain few-shot learning context. Addressing this gap, our study presents an exhaustive empirical assessment of the CLIP model within the cross-domain few-shot learning task. We undertake a comparison spanning six dimensions: base model, transfer module, classifier, loss, data augmentation, and training schedule. Furthermore, we establish a straightforward baseline model, E-base, based on our empirical analysis, underscoring the importance of our investigation. Experimental results substantiate the efficacy of our model, yielding a mean gain of 1.2% in 5-way 5-shot evaluations on the BSCD dataset.