Perspectives of Calibrated Adaptation for Few-Shot Cross-Domain Classification

Current few-shot learning techniques predominantly leverage amortization techniques based on meta-learning frameworks, which effectively adapt to unknown tasks with limited examples. However, these approaches face significant challenges in cross-domain scenarios, where the data distributions between the source domain (training data) and the target domain (testing data) differ substantially. This domain shift can lead to models that overfit the global discriminative model while underfitting their local amortization on the adaptable few-shot structure. To mitigate this problem, our proposal makes an upgrade on Conditional Neural Adaptive Processes, reformulating its conditioning mechanism to better handle cross-domain adaptation. This results in calibrated amortization of task-specific feature extractors and the construction of a robust non-parametric classifier. In our implementation, we first employ generative modeling or deterministic self-attention to all labeled context features, establishing a strong task-level alignment that adapts the extractor across domains. Additionally, we introduce a novel channel-wise normalization to further enhance the adaptation process. Our experiments on the Meta-dataset benchmark demonstrate an average <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$6.9\sim 9$ </tex-math></inline-formula>% improvement in out-of-distribution tasks, underscoring the effectiveness of exploiting calibrated adaptation in few-shot cross-domain classification.