In this repo, a number of pytorch-lightning implementations of FSL algorithms are provided, including two official ones

Boosting Few-Shot Classification with View-Learnable Contrastive Learning (ICME 2021)

Rectifying the Shortcut Learning of Background for Few-Shot Learning (NeurIPS 2021)

1. Advantages
2. Few-shot classification Results
   • miniImageNet results
3. General Guide
   • Installation
   • Runing a model
   • Creating new algorithms

This repository is built on top of LightningCLI, which is very convenient to use after being familiar with this tool.

1. Enabling multi-GPU training
   • Our implementation of FSL framework allows DistributedDataParallel (DDP) to be included in the training of Few-Shot Learning, which is not available before to the best of our knowledge. Previous researches use DataParallel (DP) instead, which is inefficient and requires more computation storages. We achieve this by modifying the DDP sampler of Pytorch, making it possible to sample few-shot learning tasks among devices. See dataset_and_process/samplers.py for details.
2. High reimplemented accuracy
   • Our reimplementations of some FSL algorithms achieve strong performance. For example, our ResNet12 implementation of ProtoNet and Cosine Classifier achieves 76+ and 80+ accuracy on 5w5s task of miniImageNet, respectively. All results can be reimplemented using pre-defined configuration files in config/.
3. Quick and convenient creation of new algorithms
   • Pytorch-lightning provides our codebase with a clean and modular structure. Built on top of LightningCLI, our codebase unifies necessary basic components of FSL, making it easy to implement a brand-new algorithm. An impletation of an algorithm usually only requires three short additional files, one specifying the lightningModule, one specifying the classifer head, and the last one specifying all configurations. For example, see the code of ProtoNet (modules/PN.py, architectures/classifier/proto_head.py) and cosine classifier (modules/cosine_classifier.py, architectures/classifier/CC_head.py.
4. Easy reproducability
   • Every time of running results in a full copy of yaml configuration file in the logging directory, enabling exact reproducability (by using the direct yaml file instead of creating a new one).
5. Enabling both episodic/non-episodic algorithms
   • Switching with a single parameter is_meta in the configuration file.

Implemented results on few-shot classification datasets. The average results of 2,000 randomly sampled episodes repeated 5 times for 1/5-shot evaluation with 95% confidence interval are reported.

To understand the code correctly, it is highly recommended to first quickly go through the pytorch-lightning documentation, especially LightningCLI. It won't be a long journey since pytorch-lightning is built on the top of pytorch.

Just run the command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

1. Downloading Datasets:
   • miniImageNet, miniImageNet-new(in COSOC)
2. Training (Except for Meta-baseline and COSOC):
   • Choose the corresponding configuration file in 'config'(e.g.set_config_PN.py for PN model), set inside the parameter 'is_test' to False, set GPU ids (multi-GPU or not), dataset directory, logging dir as well as other parameters you would like to change.
   • modify the first line in run.sh (e.g., python config/set_config_PN.py).
   • To begin the running, run the command bash run.sh
3. Training Meta-baseline:
   • This is a two-stage algorithm, with the first stage being CEloss-pretraining, followed by ProtoNet finetuning. So a two-stage training is need. The first training uses the configuration file config/set_config_meta_baseline_pretrain.py. The second uses config/set_config_meta_baseline_finetune.py, with pre-training model path from the first stage, specified by the parameterpre_trained_path in the configuration file.
4. Training COSOC:
   • For pre-training Exemplar, choose configuration file config/set_config_MoCo.py and set parameter is_exampler to True.
   • For runing COS algorithm, run the command python COS.py --save_dir [save_dir] --pretrained_Exemplar_path [model_path] --dataset_path [data_path]. [save_dir] specifies the saving directory of all foreground objects, [model_path] and [data_path] specify the pathes of pre-trained model and datasets, respectively.
   • For runing a FSL algorithm with COS, choose configuration file config/set_config_COSOC.py and set parameter data["train_dataset_params"] to the directory of saved data of COS algorithm, pre_trained_path to the directory of pre-trained Exemplar.
5. Testing:
   • Choose the same configuration file as training, set parameter is_test to True, pre_trained_path to the directory of checkpoint model (with suffix '.ckpt'), and other parameters (e.g. shot, batchsize) as you disire.
   • modify the first line in run.sh (e.g., python config/set_config_PN.py).
   • To begin the testing, run the command bash run.sh

It is quite simple to implement your own algorithm. most of algorithms only need creation of a new LightningModule and a classifier head. We give a breif description of the code structure here.

It is usually not needed to modify this file. The file run.py wraps the whole training and testing procedure of a FSL algorithm, for which all configurations are specified by an individual yaml file contained in the /config folder; see config/set_config_PN.py for example. The file run.py contains a python class Few_Shot_CLI, inherited from LightningCLI. It adds new hyperpameters (Also specified in configuration file) as well as testing process for FSL.

Need modification. The folder modules contains LightningModules for FSL models, specifying model components, optimizers, logging metrics and train/val/test processes. Notably, modules/base_module.py contains the template module for all FSL models. All other modules inherit the base module; see modules/PN.py and modules/cosine_classifier.py for how episodic/non-episodic models inherit from the base module.

Need modification. We divide general FSL architectures into feature extractor and classification head, specified respectively in architectures/feature_extractor and architectures/classifier. These are just common nn modules in pytorch, which shall be embedded in LightningModule mentioned above. The recommended feature extractor is ResNet12, which is popular and shows promising performance. The classification head, however, varies with algorithms and need specific designs.

It is usually not needed for modification. Pytorch-lightning unifies data processing across training, val and testing into a single LightningDataModule. We disign such a datamodule in dataset_and_process/datamodules/few_shot_datamodule.py for FSL, enabling episodic/non-episodic sampling and DDP for multi-GPU fast training. The definition of Dataset itself is in dataset_and_process/datasets, specified as common pytorch datasets class. There is no need to modify the dataset module unless new datasets are involved.

It is usually not needed for modification. See documentation of pytorch-lightning for detailed introductions of callbacks and Plugins. They are additional functionalities added to the system in a modular fashion.

Need modification. See LightningCLI for how a yaml configuration file works. For each algorithm, there needs one specific configuration file, though most of the configurations are the same across algorithms. Thus it is convenient to copy one configuration and change it for a new algorithm.