SINE: SIMILARITY-REGULARIZED INTRA-CLASS EXPLOITATION FOR CROSS-GRANULARITY FEW-SHOT LEARNING

Few-shot learning aims for rapid adaptation with few samples. Recently, cross-granularity few-shot learning has emerged as a promising research area, where models observe coarse labels but target fine-grained recognition among novel classes. As coarse supervision tends to eliminate feature discrimination among underlying sub-classes, existing methods commonly utilize self-supervision as a complement to explore intra-class variation. However, current methods suffer from an intrinsic conflict between contrastive learning and coarse supervision. In this paper, we locate the root cause of the intrinsic conflict. Then, we resolve it by exploiting the similarity among augmented views while ignoring the unreasonable constraint between negative pairs. Besides, we decouple contrastive learning and coarse supervision into parallel branches to better regularize the latent space. Albeit simple, our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across different benchmarks.