Incremental Few-Shot Meta-learning via Indirect Discriminant Alignment

We propose a method to train a model so it can learn new classification tasks while improving with each task solved. This amounts to combining meta-learning with incremental learning. Different tasks can have disjoint classes, so one cannot directly align different classifiers as done in model distillation. On the other hand, simply aligning features shared by all classes does not allow the base model sufficient flexibility to evolve to solve new tasks. We therefore indirectly align features relative to a minimal set of “anchor classes”. Such indirect discriminant alignment (IDA) adapts a new model to old classes without the need to re-process old data, while leaving maximum flexibility for the model to adapt to new tasks. This process enables incrementally improving the model by processing multiple learning episodes, each representing a different learning task, even with few training examples. Experiments on few-shot learning benchmarks show that this incremental approach performs favorably compared to training the model with the entire dataset at once.