StarNet: towards weakly supervised few-shot detection and explainable few-shot classification

Few-shot learning for classification has advanced significantly in recent years. Yet, these approaches rarely provide interpretability related to their decisions or localization of objects in the scene. In this paper, we introduce StarNet, featuring an end-to-end differentiable non-parametric star-model classification head. Through this head, the backbone is meta-trained using only image-level labels to produce good features for classifying previously unseen categories of few-shot test tasks using a star-model that geometrically matches between the query and support images. This also results in localization of corresponding object instances (on the query and best matching support images), providing plausible explanations for StarNet's class predictions. We evaluate StarNet on multiple few-shot classification benchmarks attaining significant gains on CUB and ImageNetLOC-FS. In addition, we test the proposed approach on the previously unexplored and challenging task of Weakly Supervised Few-Shot Object Detection (WS-FSOD), obtaining significant improvements over the baselines.