Low-shot visual object recognition

Low-shot visual learning - the ability to recognize novel object categories from very few examples - is a hallmark of human visual intelligence. Existing machine learning approaches fail to generalize in the same way. To make progress on this foundational problem, we present a novel protocol to evaluate low-shot learning on complex images where the learner is permitted to first build a feature representation. Then, we propose and evaluate representation regularization techniques that improve the effectiveness of convolutional networks at the task of low-shot learning, leading to a 2x reduction in the amount of training data required at equal accuracy rates on the challenging ImageNet dataset.