  We consider the task of few-shot intent detection, which involves training a
deep learning model to classify utterances based on their underlying intents
using only a small amount of labeled data. The current approach to address this
problem is through continual pre-training, i.e., fine-tuning pre-trained
language models (PLMs) on external resources (e.g., conversational corpora,
public intent detection datasets, or natural language understanding datasets)
before using them as utterance encoders for training an intent classifier. In
this paper, we show that continual pre-training may not be essential, since the
overfitting problem of PLMs on this task may not be as serious as expected.
Specifically, we find that directly fine-tuning PLMs on only a handful of
labeled examples already yields decent results compared to methods that employ
continual pre-training, and the performance gap diminishes rapidly as the
number of labeled data increases. To maximize the utilization of the limited
available data, we propose a context augmentation method and leverage
sequential self-distillation to boost performance. Comprehensive experiments on
real-world benchmarks show that given only two or more labeled samples per
class, direct fine-tuning outperforms many strong baselines that utilize
external data sources for continual pre-training. The code can be found at
https://github.com/hdzhang-code/DFTPlus.
