# ViT-ProtoNet for Few-Shot Image Classification: A Multi-Benchmark Evaluation Source: [ViT-ProtoNet for Few-Shot Image Classification: A Multi-Benchmark Evaluation]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T05:09:30.174Z Authors: Abdulvahap Mutlu, \\c{S}eng\\"ul Do\\u{g}an, T\\"urker Tuncer Published: 2025-07-12T14:19:04.000Z ## Abstract The remarkable representational power of Vision Transformers (ViTs) remains underutilized in few-shot image classification. In this work, we introduce ViT-ProtoNet, which integrates a ViT-Small backbone into the Prototypical Network framework. By averaging class conditional token embeddings from a handful of support examples, ViT-ProtoNet constructs robust prototypes that generalize to novel categories under 5-shot settings. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation on four standard benchmarks: Mini-ImageNet, FC100, CUB-200, and CIFAR-FS, including overlapped support variants to assess robustness. Across all splits, ViT-ProtoNet consistently outperforms CNN-based prototypical counterparts, achieving up to a 3.2\\% improvement in 5-shot accuracy and demonstrating superior feature separability in latent space. Furthermore, it outperforms or is competitive with transformer-based competitors using a more lightweight backbone. Comprehensive ablations examine the impact of transformer depth, patch size, and fine-tuning strategy. To foster reproducibility, we release code and pretrained weights. Our results establish ViT-ProtoNet as a powerful, flexible approach for few-shot classification and set a new baseline for transformer-based meta-learners. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()