StyleAdv: Meta Style Adversarial Training for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL) is a recently emerging task that tackles few-shot learning across different domains. It aims at transferring prior knowledge learned on the source dataset to novel target datasets. The CD-FSL task is especially challenged by the huge domain gap between different datasets. Critically, such a domain gap actually comes from the changes of visual styles, and wave-SAN [10] empirically shows that spanning the style distribution of the source data helps alleviate this issue. However, wave-SAN simply swaps styles of two images. Such a vanilla operation makes the generated styles “real” and “easy”, which still fall into the original set of the source styles. Thus, inspired by vanilla adversarial learning, a novel model-agnostic meta Style Adversarial training (StyleAdv) method together with a novel style adversarial attack method is proposed for CD-FSL. Particularly, our style attack method synthesizes both “virtual” and “hard” adversarial styles for model training. This is achieved by perturbing the original style with the signed style gradients. By continually attacking styles and forcing the model to recognize these challenging adversarial styles, our model is gradually robust to the visual styles, thus boosting the generalization ability for novel target datasets. Besides the typical CNN-based backbone, we also employ our StyleAdv method on large-scale pre-trained vision transformer. Extensive experiments conducted on eight various target datasets show the effectiveness of our method. Whether built upon ResNet or ViT, we achieve the new state of the art for CD-FSL. Code is available at https://github.com/lovelyqian/StyleAdv-CDFSL.