  This paper addresses the few-shot image classification problem, where the
classification task is performed on unlabeled query samples given a small
amount of labeled support samples only. One major challenge of the few-shot
learning problem is the large variety of object visual appearances that
prevents the support samples to represent that object comprehensively. This
might result in a significant difference between support and query samples,
therefore undermining the performance of few-shot algorithms. In this paper, we
tackle the problem by proposing Few-shot Cosine Transformer (FS-CT), where the
relational map between supports and queries is effectively obtained for the
few-shot tasks. The FS-CT consists of two parts, a learnable prototypical
embedding network to obtain categorical representations from support samples
with hard cases, and a transformer encoder to effectively achieve the
relational map from two different support and query samples. We introduce
Cosine Attention, a more robust and stable attention module that enhances the
transformer module significantly and therefore improves FS-CT performance from
5% to over 20% in accuracy compared to the default scaled dot-product
mechanism. Our method performs competitive results in mini-ImageNet, CUB-200,
and CIFAR-FS on 1-shot learning and 5-shot learning tasks across backbones and
few-shot configurations. We also developed a custom few-shot dataset for Yoga
pose recognition to demonstrate the potential of our algorithm for practical
application. Our FS-CT with cosine attention is a lightweight, simple few-shot
algorithm that can be applied for a wide range of applications, such as
healthcare, medical, and security surveillance. The official implementation
code of our Few-shot Cosine Transformer is available at
https://github.com/vinuni-vishc/Few-Shot-Cosine-Transformer
