Abstract
We present a conceptually simple, flexible, and general
framework for few-shot learning, where a classifier must
learn to recognise new classes given only few examples from
each. Our method, called the Relation Network (RN), is
trained end-to-end from scratch. During meta-learning, it
learns to learn a deep distance metric to compare a small
number of images within episodes, each of which is designed to simulate the few-shot setting. Once trained, a RN
is able to classify images of new classes by computing relation scores between query images and the few examples of
each new class without further updating the network. Besides providing improved performance on few-shot learning, our framework is easily extended to zero-shot learning.
Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that
our simple approach provides a unified and effective approach for both of these two tasks