  Currently available benchmarks for few-shot learning (machine learning with
few training examples) are limited in the domains they cover, primarily
focusing on image classification. This work aims to alleviate this reliance on
image-based benchmarks by offering the first comprehensive, public and fully
reproducible audio based alternative, covering a variety of sound domains and
experimental settings. We compare the few-shot classification performance of a
variety of techniques on seven audio datasets (spanning environmental sounds to
human-speech). Extending this, we carry out in-depth analyses of joint training
(where all datasets are used during training) and cross-dataset adaptation
protocols, establishing the possibility of a generalised audio few-shot
classification algorithm. Our experimentation shows gradient-based
meta-learning methods such as MAML and Meta-Curvature consistently outperform
both metric and baseline methods. We also demonstrate that the joint training
routine helps overall generalisation for the environmental sound databases
included, as well as being a somewhat-effective method of tackling the
cross-dataset/domain setting.
