  We propose prototypical networks for the problem of few-shot classification,
where a classifier must generalize to new classes not seen in the training set,
given only a small number of examples of each new class. Prototypical networks
learn a metric space in which classification can be performed by computing
distances to prototype representations of each class. Compared to recent
approaches for few-shot learning, they reflect a simpler inductive bias that is
beneficial in this limited-data regime, and achieve excellent results. We
provide an analysis showing that some simple design decisions can yield
substantial improvements over recent approaches involving complicated
architectural choices and meta-learning. We further extend prototypical
networks to zero-shot learning and achieve state-of-the-art results on the
CU-Birds dataset.
