Prototypical Networks and Their Variants

In the last chapter, we learned what siamese networks are and how they are used to perform few-shot learning tasks. We also explored how to use siamese networks for performing face and audio recognition. In this chapter, we will look at another interesting few-shot learning algorithm called a prototypical network, which has the ability to generalize even to the class that is not present in a training set. We will start off with understanding what prototypical networks are, after which we will see how to perform a classification task in an omniglot dataset using prototypical network. We will then see different variants of prototypical networks, such as Gaussian prototypical networks and semi-prototypical networks.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following:

• Prototypical networks
• The algorithm of prototypical networks
• Classification using prototypical networks
• Gaussian prototypical networks
• The Gaussian prototypical network algorithm
• Semi-prototypical network