Abstract
We consider the task of multimodal one-shot speech-image matching. An agent is shown a picture along with a spoken word describing the object in the picture, e.g. cookie, broccoli and ice-cream. After observing one paired speech-image example per class, it is shown a new set of unseen pictures, and asked to pick the "ice-cream". Previous work attempted to tackle this problem using transfer learning: supervised models are trained on labelled background data not containing any of the one-shot classes. Here we compare transfer learning to unsupervised models trained on unlabelled in-domain data. On a dataset of paired isolated spoken and visual digits, we specifically compare unsupervised autoencoder-like models to supervised classifier and Siamese neural networks. In both unimodal and multimodal few-shot matching experiments, we find that transfer learning outperforms unsupervised training. We also present experiments towards combining the two methodologies, but find that transfer learni