One-shot Learning - Motivation

Motivation

The ability to learn object categories from few examples, and at a rapid pace, has been demonstrated in humans, and it is estimated that a child has learned almost of all the 10 ~ 30 thousand object categories in the world by the age of six. Yet this achievement of the human mind is due not only to its computational power, but also to its ability to synthesize and learn new object classes from existing information about different, previously learned classes. The images below illustrate the idea that given two examples from two different object classes: one, an unknown object composed of familiar shapes, the second, an unknown, amorphous shape; it is much easier for humans to recognize the former than the latter, suggesting that humans make use of this existing knowledge of previously learned classes when learning new ones. Thus the key motivation and intuition for this one-shot learning technique in the artificial, computational world is that systems, like humans, can use prior information of object categories to learn and classify new objects.