Rethinking the Good Enough Embedding for Easy Few-Shot Learning

Michael Karnes; Alper Yilmaz

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arXiv · 2605.14145

Rethinking the Good Enough Embedding for Easy Few-Shot Learning

Michael Karnes·Alper Yilmaz

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Abstract

The field of deep visual recognition is undergoing a paradigm shift toward universal representations. The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that diverse architectures trained on massive datasets are converging toward a shared, "ideal" latent space. This again raises a critical question: is a "Good Embedding All You Need?" In this paper, we leverage this convergence to demonstrate that off-the-shelf embeddings are inherently "good enough" for complex tasks, rendering intensive task-specific fine-tuning unnecessary. We explore this hypothesis within the few-shot learning framework, proposing a straightforward, non-parametric pipeline that entirely bypasses backpropagation. By utilizing a k-Nearest Neighbor classifier on frozen DINOv2-L features, we conduct a layer-wise characterization to identify an optimal feature extraction. We further demonstrate that manifold refinement via PCA and ICA provides a beneficial regularizing effect. Our results across four major benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently surpasses sophisticated meta-learning algorithms, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

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Michael Karnes, Alper Yilmaz. 2026-05-13. Rethinking the Good Enough Embedding for Easy Few-Shot Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14145

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