Teachers cooperation: team-knowledge distillation for multiple cross-domain few-shot learning

Although few-shot learning (FSL) has achieved great progress, it is still an enormous challenge especially when the source and target set are from different domains, which is also known as cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL). Utilizing more source domain data is an effective way to improve the performance of CD-FSL. However, knowledge from different source domains may entangle and confuse with each other, which hurts the performance on the target domain. Therefore, we propose team-knowledge distillation networks (TKD-Net) to tackle this problem, which explores a strategy to help the cooperation of multiple teachers. Specifically, we distill knowledge from the cooperation of teacher networks to a single student network in a meta-learning framework. It incorporates task-oriented knowledge distillation and multiple cooperation among teachers to train an efficient student with better generalization ability on unseen tasks. Moreover, our TKD-Net employs both response-based knowledge and relation-based knowledge to transfer more comprehensive and effective knowledge. Extensive experimental results on four fine-grained datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed TKD-Net approach.