COBRA: COmBinatorial Retrieval Augmentation for Few-Shot Learning

Retrieval augmentation, the practice of retrieving additional data from large auxiliary pools, has emerged as an effective technique for enhancing model performance in the low-data regime, e.g., few-shot learning. Prior approaches have employed only \emph{nearest-neighbor} based strategies for data selection, which retrieve auxiliary samples with high similarity to instances in the training set. However, these approaches are prone to selecting highly redundant samples, since they fail to incorporate any notion of diversity. In our work, we first demonstrate that data selection strategies used in prior retrieval-augmented few-shot learning settings can be generalized using a class of functions known as Combinatorial Mutual Information (CMI) measures. We then propose COBRA (COmBinatorial Retrieval Augmentation), which employs an alternative CMI measure that considers both diversity and similarity to a target dataset. COBRA consistently outperforms previous retrieval approaches across datasets and few-shot learning techniques when used to retrieve samples from LAION-2B. Using COBRA introduces negligible computational overhead to the cost of retrieval, while providing significant gains in downstream model performance.