Collaborative Self-Supervised Evolution for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Self-supervised learning, which leverages unlabeled data to learn useful feature representations by constructing auxiliary tasks, has been widely explored in few-shot scene classification to improve the feature representation and generalization capabilities of deep models in scarce data. However, most of the current related work adopts specific self-supervised auxiliary tasks (SSATs) for combinatorial improvement, and does not explore the intrinsic connection between different pretext tasks. In practice, the linkage of SSATs is complex, and the optimization of task-sharing parameters by minimizing linear combinations of losses can be conflicting. In addition, although a single combination of SSAT can improve certain performance on the baseline, it is not the personalized optimal solution on various remote sensing datasets with diverse properties. In this article, we propose a collaborative self-supervised evolution (so-called CSENet) framework for few-shot remote sensing scene classification to automatically search for appropriate weights in balancing the task conflicts. In contrast to most existing methods, which consider all SSATs to be equally efficacious or fixed-weighted for the few-shot main task, CSENet achieves autonomous co-evolutionary optimization by encoding arbitrary self-supervised weights. Specifically, the complex self-supervised combinations for different remote sensing data are transformed into an evolutionary optimization problem, where chromosomes with weighting variables obtain the optimal combination with genetic operators. Based on the transfer learning few-shot training paradigm, CSENet first efficiently searches for optimal self-supervised combinations with potential by the proposed automatic collaborative evolution strategy and automatically adjusts the weights without manual settings. Importantly, CSENet provides both inductive and transductive inference, and supports the embedding of arbitrary SSATs. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated by state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on three benchmark datasets.