BATR-FST: Bi-Level Adaptive Token Refinement for Few-Shot Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Al-Habib, Mohammed, Zhang, Zuping, Noman, Abdulrahman
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Al-Habib, Mohammed
Zhang, Zuping
Noman, Abdulrahman
author_facet Al-Habib, Mohammed
Zhang, Zuping
Noman, Abdulrahman
contents Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown significant promise in computer vision applications. However, their performance in few-shot learning is limited by challenges in refining token-level interactions, struggling with limited training data, and developing a strong inductive bias. Existing methods often depend on inflexible token matching or basic similarity measures, which limit the effective incorporation of global context and localized feature refinement. To address these challenges, we propose Bi-Level Adaptive Token Refinement for Few-Shot Transformers (BATR-FST), a two-stage approach that progressively improves token representations and maintains a robust inductive bias for few-shot classification. During the pre-training phase, Masked Image Modeling (MIM) provides Vision Transformers (ViTs) with transferable patch-level representations by recreating masked image regions, providing a robust basis for subsequent adaptation. In the meta-fine-tuning phase, BATR-FST incorporates a Bi-Level Adaptive Token Refinement module that utilizes Token Clustering to capture localized interactions, Uncertainty-Aware Token Weighting to prioritize dependable features, and a Bi-Level Attention mechanism to balance intra-cluster and inter-cluster relationships, thereby facilitating thorough token refinement. Furthermore, Graph Token Propagation ensures semantic consistency between support and query instances, while a Class Separation Penalty preserves different class borders, enhancing discriminative capability. Extensive experiments on three benchmark few-shot datasets demonstrate that BATR-FST achieves superior results in both 1-shot and 5-shot scenarios and improves the few-shot classification via transformers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_12768
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BATR-FST: Bi-Level Adaptive Token Refinement for Few-Shot Transformers
Al-Habib, Mohammed
Zhang, Zuping
Noman, Abdulrahman
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown significant promise in computer vision applications. However, their performance in few-shot learning is limited by challenges in refining token-level interactions, struggling with limited training data, and developing a strong inductive bias. Existing methods often depend on inflexible token matching or basic similarity measures, which limit the effective incorporation of global context and localized feature refinement. To address these challenges, we propose Bi-Level Adaptive Token Refinement for Few-Shot Transformers (BATR-FST), a two-stage approach that progressively improves token representations and maintains a robust inductive bias for few-shot classification. During the pre-training phase, Masked Image Modeling (MIM) provides Vision Transformers (ViTs) with transferable patch-level representations by recreating masked image regions, providing a robust basis for subsequent adaptation. In the meta-fine-tuning phase, BATR-FST incorporates a Bi-Level Adaptive Token Refinement module that utilizes Token Clustering to capture localized interactions, Uncertainty-Aware Token Weighting to prioritize dependable features, and a Bi-Level Attention mechanism to balance intra-cluster and inter-cluster relationships, thereby facilitating thorough token refinement. Furthermore, Graph Token Propagation ensures semantic consistency between support and query instances, while a Class Separation Penalty preserves different class borders, enhancing discriminative capability. Extensive experiments on three benchmark few-shot datasets demonstrate that BATR-FST achieves superior results in both 1-shot and 5-shot scenarios and improves the few-shot classification via transformers.
title BATR-FST: Bi-Level Adaptive Token Refinement for Few-Shot Transformers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12768