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arXiv · 2610.27029

EGiME: Entropy-Guided Model Evaluation in Few-Shot Learning

Dequan Jin·Tao Li·Lifeng Xing·Shihui Ying·Hui Zhao
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Abstract

The feature-extraction quality of pre-trained models sets the ceiling of downstream transfer learning, yet few-shot model selection remains difficult: supervised evaluation on scarce labels is unstable and yields fluctuating rankings. We propose Entropy-Guided Model Evaluation (EGiME), a semi-supervised criterion that assesses a candidate model from the clustering structure of its feature space without any classifier training. EGiME performs $K$-means clustering over all labeled and unlabeled samples, then combines two entropy terms: an inter-cluster entropy measuring global separability, and an intra-cluster entropy measuring the compactness of labeled anchors, fused through an inverse-frequency weight that emphasizes small clusters. On five few-shot benchmarks and nine pre-trained models, EGiME achieves a correlation score of 0.966 with the full-pool ground-truth accuracy obtained by averaging the accuracies of K-means, KNN, and SVM. At labeling ratios of 4\%--20\%, it produces markedly more stable model rankings than cross-validated supervised baselines, establishing it as a practical alternative to conventional supervised evaluation for pre-trained model selection under data scarcity.

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Dequan Jin, Tao Li, Lifeng Xing, Shihui Ying, Hui Zhao. 2026-10-19. EGiME: Entropy-Guided Model Evaluation in Few-Shot Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27029

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