Optimal Transport of Diverse Unsupervised Tasks for Robust Learning from Noisy Few-Shot Data

Xiaofan Que, Qi Yu* ;

"Noisy few-shot learning (NFSL) presents novel challenges primarily due to the interplay between noisy labels and limited training data. While data cleansing offers a viable solution to address noisy labels in the general learning settings, it exacerbates information loss in FSL due to limited training data, resulting in inadequate model training. To best recover the underlying task manifold corrupted by the noisy labels, we resort to learning from uniquely designed unsupervised auxiliary tasks to compensate for information loss. Using unsupervised tasks can effectively avoid additional annotation costs and minimize the risk of introducing additional label noises. However, a randomly constructed unsupervised task may misguide the model to learn sample-specific features that are likely to compromise the primary few-shot learning task due to the noisy weak learning signals. We propose to conduct novel auxiliary task selection to ensure the intra-diversity among the unlabeled samples within a task. Domain invariant features are then learned from carefully constructed auxiliary tasks to best recover the original data manifold. We conduct a theoretical analysis to derive novel generalization bounds for learning with auxiliary tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our method outperforms existing noisy few-shot learning methods under various in-domain and cross-domain few-shot classification benchmarks."