Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
8-2025
Abstract
Few-shot learning (FSL) addresses the challenge of classifying novel classes with limited training samples. While some methods leverage semantic knowledge from smaller-scale models to mitigate data scarcity, these approaches often introduce noise and bias due to the data's inherent simplicity. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Synergistic Knowledge Transfer (SYNTRANS), which effectively transfers diverse and complementary knowledge from large multimodal models to empower the off-the-shelf few-shot learner. Specifically, SYNTRANS employs CLIP as a robust teacher and uses a few-shot vision encoder as a weak student, distilling semantic-aligned visual knowledge via an unsupervised proxy task. Subsequently, a training-free synergistic knowledge mining module facilitates collaboration among large multimodal models to extract high-quality semantic knowledge. Building upon this, a visual-semantic bridging module enables bi-directional knowledge transfer between visual and semantic spaces, transforming explicit visual and implicit semantic knowledge into category-specific classifier weights. Finally, SYNTRANS introduces a visual weight generator and a semantic weight reconstructor to adaptively construct optimal multimodal FSL classifiers. Experimental results on four FSL datasets demonstrate that SYNTRANS, even when paired with a simple few-shot vision encoder, significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.
Discipline
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
Areas of Excellence
Digital transformation
Publication
IJCAI '25: Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Montreal, Canada, August 16-22
First Page
6227
Last Page
6235
Identifier
10.24963/ijcai.2025/693
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Citation
TANG, Hao; HE, Shengfeng; and QIN, Jing.
Connecting giants: Synergistic knowledge transfer of large multimodal models for few-shot learning. (2025). IJCAI '25: Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Montreal, Canada, August 16-22. 6227-6235.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/10790
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/693