Rethinking the Good Enough Embedding for Easy Few-Shot Learning

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.