Query-Aware Cross-Mixup and Cross-Reconstruction for Few-Shot Fine-Grained Image Classification

Few-shot fine-grained image classification is prominent but challenging in computer vision, aiming to distinguish sub-classes under the same parent class but with only a few labeled support samples. Data augmentation techniques were explored to address the few-shot issue, but they often fail to mitigate the bias between support and query samples. Therefore, in this paper we propose a query-aware cross-mixup and cross-reconstruction method to address both few-shot and fine-grained issues. Specifically, in the training phase, we randomly select query samples and mix them with the support samples from the same class to augment the support set. This first strategy ensures the augmented support set query-aware within each sub-class. Then, we reconstruct both query samples and support samples from both original and cross-mixed support samples, thus leveraging both cross-reconstruction and self-reconstruction to enhance classification. This second strategy, enabling the reconstruction also query-aware, further mitigates the bias between support and query samples, leading to more reliable generalization. We evaluate our proposed method on four widely used few-shot fine-grained image classification datasets, and experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in achieving the state-of-the-art classification performance.