The goal of few-shot classification is to learn a model that can classify novel classes using only a few training examples. Despite the promising results shown by existing meta-learning algorithms in solving the few-shot classification problem, there still remains an important challenge: how to generalize to unseen domains while meta-learning on multiple seen domains? In this paper, we propose an optimization-based meta-learning method, called Combining Domain-Specific Meta-Learners (CosML), that addresses the cross-domain few-shot classification problem. CosML first trains a set of meta-learners, one for each training domain, to learn prior knowledge (i.e., meta-parameters) specific to each domain. The domain-specific meta-learners are then combined in the \emph{parameter space}, by taking a weighted average of their meta-parameters, which is used as the initialization parameters of a task network that is quickly adapted to novel few-shot classification tasks in an unseen domain. Our experiments show that CosML outperforms a range of state-of-the-art methods and achieves strong cross-domain generalization ability.
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft AI & Research（微软人工智能与研究院）；IBM T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
Few-shot learning aims to learn classifiers for new classes with only a few training examples per class. Most existing few-shot learning approaches belong to either metric-based meta-learning or optimization-based meta-learning category, both of which have achieved successes in the simplified "$k$-shot $N$-way" image classification settings. Specifically, the optimization-based approaches train a meta-learner to predict the parameters of the task-specific classifiers. The task-specific classifiers are required to be homogeneous-structured to ease the parameter prediction, so the meta-learning …
School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学电子工程与计算机科学学院）
The performance of meta-learning approaches for few-shot learning generally depends on three aspects: features suitable for comparison, the classifier ( base learner ) suitable for low-data scenarios, and valuable information from the samples to classify. In this work, we make improvements for the last two aspects: 1) although there are many effective base learners, there is a trade-off between generalization performance and computational overhead, so we introduce multi-class least squares support vector machine as our base learner which obtains better generation than existing ones with less c…
Developing algorithms that are able to generalize to a novel task given only a few labeled examples represents a fundamental challenge in closing the gap between machine- and human-level performance. The core of human cognition lies in the structured, reusable concepts that help us to rapidly adapt to new tasks and provide reasoning behind our decisions. However, existing meta-learning methods learn complex representations across prior labeled tasks without imposing any structure on the learned representations. Here we propose COMET, a meta-learning method that improves generalization ability …
Microsoft AI & Research（微软人工智能与研究）；IBM Research AI（IBM研究人工智能）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究）
Few-shot Learning aims to learn classifiers for new classes with only a few training examples per class. Existing meta-learning or metric-learning based few-shot learning approaches are limited in handling diverse domains with various number of labels. The meta-learning approaches train a meta learner to predict weights of homogeneous-structured task-specific networks, requiring a uniform number of classes across tasks. The metric-learning approaches learn one task-invariant metric for all the tasks, and they fail if the tasks diverge. We propose to deal with these limitations with meta metric…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）
Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to generate a classifier using limited labeled examples. Many existing works take the meta-learning approach, constructing a few-shot learner that can learn from few-shot examples to generate a classifier. Typically, the few-shot learner is constructed or meta-trained by sampling multiple few-shot tasks in turn and optimizing the few-shot learner's performance in generating classifiers for those tasks. The performance is measured by how well the resulting classifiers classify the test (i.e., query) examples of those tasks. In this paper, we point out two potential …
Image geolocalization is the challenging task of predicting the geographic coordinates of origin for a given photo. It is an unsolved problem relying on the ability to combine visual clues with general knowledge about the world to make accurate predictions across geographies. We present $\href{https://huggingface.co/geolocal/StreetCLIP}{\text{StreetCLIP}}$, a robust, publicly available foundation model not only achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple open-domain image geolocalization benchmarks but also doing so in a zero-shot setting, outperforming supervised models trained on more…
Rice University（莱斯大学）；University of Texas, Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
We present a new approach, called meta-meta classification, to learning in small-data settings. In this approach, one uses a large set of learning problems to design an ensemble of learners, where each learner has high bias and low variance and is skilled at solving a specific type of learning problem. The meta-meta classifier learns how to examine a given learning problem and combine the various learners to solve the problem. The meta-meta learning approach is especially suited to solving few-shot learning tasks, as it is easier to learn to classify a new learning problem with little data tha…
Few-shot learning is challenging for learning algorithms that learn each task in isolation and from scratch. In contrast, meta-learning learns from many related tasks a meta-learner that can learn a new task more accurately and faster with fewer examples, where the choice of meta-learners is crucial. In this paper, we develop Meta-SGD, an SGD-like, easily trainable meta-learner that can initialize and adapt any differentiable learner in just one step, on both supervised learning and reinforcement learning. Compared to the popular meta-learner LSTM, Meta-SGD is conceptually simpler, easier to i…
Few-shot image classification (FSIC), which requires a model to recognize new categories via learning from few images of these categories, has attracted lots of attention. Recently, meta-learning based methods have been shown as a promising direction for FSIC. Commonly, they train a meta-learner (meta-learning model) to learn easy fine-tuning weight, and when solving an FSIC task, the meta-learner efficiently fine-tunes itself to a task-specific model by updating itself on few images of the task. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning based layer-wise adaptive updating (LWAU) method f…
Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Learning from limited exemplars (few-shot learning) is a fundamental, unsolved problem that has been laboriously explored in the machine learning community. However, current few-shot learners are mostly supervised and rely heavily on a large amount of labeled examples. Unsupervised learning is a more natural procedure for cognitive mammals and has produced promising results in many machine learning tasks. In the current study, we develop a method to learn an unsupervised few-shot learner via self-supervised training (UFLST), which can effectively generalize to novel but related classes. The pr…
Northwestern Polytechnical University of China（中国西北工业大学）；AIBEE；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Huawei Cloud（华为云）
Recently, meta-learning has been shown as a promising way to solve few-shot learning. In this paper, inspired by the human cognition process which utilizes both prior-knowledge and vision attention in learning new knowledge, we present a novel paradigm of meta-learning approach with three developments to introduce attention mechanism and prior-knowledge for meta-learning. In our approach, prior-knowledge is responsible for helping meta-learner expressing the input data into high-level representation space, and attention mechanism enables meta-learner focusing on key features of the data in the…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
Few-shot learning aims to train efficient predictive models with a few examples. The lack of training data leads to poor models that perform high-variance or low-confidence predictions. In this paper, we propose to meta-learn the ensemble of epoch-wise empirical Bayes models (E3BM) to achieve robust predictions. "Epoch-wise" means that each training epoch has a Bayes model whose parameters are specifically learned and deployed. "Empirical" means that the hyperparameters, e.g., used for learning and ensembling the epoch-wise models, are generated by hyperprior learners conditional on task-speci…
Polythetic classifications, based on shared patterns of features that need neither be universal nor constant among members of a class, are common in the natural world and greatly outnumber monothetic classifications over a set of features. We show that threshold meta-learners, such as Prototypical Networks, require an embedding dimension that is exponential in the number of task-relevant features to emulate these functions. In contrast, attentional classifiers, such as Matching Networks, are polythetic by default and able to solve these problems with a linear embedding dimension. However, we f…
Center for Research in Computer Vision（计算机视觉研究中心）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
Meta-learning approaches have been proposed to tackle the few-shot learning problem.Typically, a meta-learner is trained on a variety of tasks in the hopes of being generalizable to new tasks. However, the generalizability on new tasks of a meta-learner could be fragile when it is over-trained on existing tasks during meta-training phase. In other words, the initial model of a meta-learner could be too biased towards existing tasks to adapt to new tasks, especially when only very few examples are available to update the model. To avoid a biased meta-learner and improve its generalizability, we…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
Deep neural networks are highly effective when a large number of labeled samples are available but fail with few-shot classification tasks. Recently, meta-learning methods have received much attention, which train a meta-learner on massive additional tasks to gain the knowledge to instruct the few-shot classification. Usually, the training tasks are randomly sampled and performed indiscriminately, often making the meta-learner stuck into a bad local optimum. Some works in the optimization of deep neural networks have shown that a better arrangement of training data can make the classifier conv…
Pohang University of Science and Technology（浦项科技大学）
Gradient-based meta-learning methods leverage gradient descent to learn the commonalities among various tasks. While previous such methods have been successful in meta-learning tasks, they resort to simple gradient descent during meta-testing. Our primary contribution is the {\em MT-net}, which enables the meta-learner to learn on each layer's activation space a subspace that the task-specific learner performs gradient descent on. Additionally, a task-specific learner of an {\em MT-net} performs gradient descent with respect to a meta-learned distance metric, which warps the activation space t…
Majority of the modern meta-learning methods for few-shot classification tasks operate in two phases: a meta-training phase where the meta-learner learns a generic representation by solving multiple few-shot tasks sampled from a large dataset and a testing phase, where the meta-learner leverages its learnt internal representation for a specific few-shot task involving classes which were not seen during the meta-training phase. To the best of our knowledge, all such meta-learning methods use a single base dataset for meta-training to sample tasks from and do not adapt the algorithm after meta-t…
Nowadays, transformer-based models gradually become the default choice for artificial intelligence pioneers. The models also show superiority even in the few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we revisit the classical methods and propose a new few-shot alternative. Specifically, we investigate the few-shot one-class problem, which actually takes a known sample as a reference to detect whether an unknown instance belongs to the same class. This problem can be studied from the perspective of sequence match. It is shown that with meta-learning, the classical sequence match method, i.e. Compare-Aggreg…
Deep neural language models have set new breakthroughs in many tasks of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Recent work has shown that deep transformer language models (pretrained on large amounts of texts) can achieve high levels of task-specific few-shot performance comparable to state-of-the-art models. However, the ability of these large language models in few-shot transfer learning has not yet been explored in the biomedical domain. We investigated the performance of two powerful transformer language models, i.e. GPT-3 and BioBERT, in few-shot settings on various biomedical NLP tasks. The …
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF--better few-shot fine-tuning of language models--a suite of simple and complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
We propose a meta-learning algorithm utilizing a linear transformer that carries out null-space projection of neural network outputs. The main idea is to construct an alternative classification space such that the error signals during few-shot learning are quickly zero-forced on that space so that reliable classification on low data is possible. The final decision on a query is obtained utilizing a null-space-projected distance measure between the network output and reference vectors, both of which have been trained in the initial learning phase. Among the known methods with a given model size…
Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；National Tsing Hua University（清华大学（台湾））
Few-shot learning is a challenging problem that has attracted more and more attention recently since abundant training samples are difficult to obtain in practical applications. Meta-learning has been proposed to address this issue, which focuses on quickly adapting a predictor as a base-learner to new tasks, given limited labeled samples. However, a critical challenge for meta-learning is the representation deficiency since it is hard to discover common information from a small number of training samples or even one, as is the representation of key features from such little information. As a …
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE)（人工智能研究中心）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Task-oriented dialogue systems use four connected modules, namely, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a Dialogue State Tracking (DST), Dialogue Policy (DP) and Natural Language Generation (NLG). A research challenge is to learn each module with the least amount of samples (i.e., few-shots) given the high cost related to the data collection. The most common and effective technique to solve this problem is transfer learning, where large language models, either pre-trained on text or task-specific data, are fine-tuned on the few samples. These methods require fine-tuning steps and a set of par…
LLMs as In-Context Meta-Learners for Model and Hyperparameter Selection
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚实验室）；Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Mines Paris, PSL University（信息研究中心，巴黎 Mines，PSL 大学）；Department of Data Science, EURECOM（数据科学系，EURECOM）
Previous works on meta-learning either relied on elaborately hand-designed network structures or adopted specialized learning rules to a particular domain. We propose a universal framework to optimize the meta-learning process automatically by adopting neural architecture search technique (NAS). NAS automatically generates and evaluates meta-learner's architecture for few-shot learning problems, while the meta-learner uses meta-learning algorithm to optimize its parameters based on the distribution of learning tasks. Parameter sharing and experience replay are adopted to accelerate the archite…
Meta Learning has been in focus in recent years due to the meta-learner model's ability to adapt well and generalize to new tasks, thus, reducing both the time and data requirements for learning. However, a major drawback of meta learner is that, to reach to a state from where learning new tasks becomes feasible with less data, it requires a large number of iterations and a lot of time. We address this issue by proposing various acceleration techniques to speed up meta learning algorithms such as MAML (Model Agnostic Meta Learning). We present 3.73X acceleration on a well known RNN optimizer b…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Microsoft（微软）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；UNC Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
Large language models such as GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) can perform arbitrary tasks without undergoing fine-tuning after being prompted with only a few labeled examples. An arbitrary task can be reformulated as a natural language prompt, and a language model can be asked to generate the completion, indirectly performing the task in a paradigm known as prompt-based learning. To date, emergent prompt-based learning capabilities have mainly been demonstrated for unidirectional language models. However, bidirectional language models pre-trained on denoising objectives such as masked language mode…
Cold-start problems are long-standing challenges for practical recommendations. Most existing recommendation algorithms rely on extensive observed data and are brittle to recommendation scenarios with few interactions. This paper addresses such problems using few-shot learning and meta learning. Our approach is based on the insight that having a good generalization from a few examples relies on both a generic model initialization and an effective strategy for adapting this model to newly arising tasks. To accomplish this, we combine the scenario-specific learning with a model-agnostic sequenti…
Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；Technical University of Ostrava（俄斯特拉发技术大学）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）
One of the challenging questions in time series forecasting is how to find the best algorithm. In recent years, a recommender system scheme has been developed for time series analysis using a meta-learning approach. This system selects the best forecasting method with consideration of the time series characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to focusing on some of the unanswered questions resulting from the use of meta-learning in time series forecasting. Therefore, three main gaps in previous works are addressed including, analyzing various subsets of top forecasters as inpu…
Microsoft AI（微软人工智能）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学学院市分校）
Existing meta-learners primarily focus on improving the average task accuracy across multiple episodes. Different episodes, however, may vary in hardness and quality leading to a wide gap in the meta-learner's performance across episodes. Understanding this issue is particularly critical in industrial few-shot settings, where there is limited control over test episodes as they are typically uploaded by end-users. In this paper, we empirically analyse the behaviour of meta-learners on episodes of varying hardness across three standard benchmark datasets: CIFAR-FS, mini-ImageNet, and tiered-Imag…
UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Amazon Web Services（亚马逊云科技）；UMass Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
Many meta-learning approaches for few-shot learning rely on simple base learners such as nearest-neighbor classifiers. However, even in the few-shot regime, discriminatively trained linear predictors can offer better generalization. We propose to use these predictors as base learners to learn representations for few-shot learning and show they offer better tradeoffs between feature size and performance across a range of few-shot recognition benchmarks. Our objective is to learn feature embeddings that generalize well under a linear classification rule for novel categories. To efficiently solve…
Meta-learning algorithms aim to learn two components: a model that predicts targets for a task, and a base learner that quickly updates that model when given examples from a new task. This additional level of learning can be powerful, but it also creates another potential source for overfitting, since we can now overfit in either the model or the base learner. We describe both of these forms of metalearning overfitting, and demonstrate that they appear experimentally in common meta-learning benchmarks. We then use an information-theoretic framework to discuss meta-augmentation, a way to add ra…
University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
We investigate the role of self-supervised learning (SSL) in the context of few-shot learning. Although recent research has shown the benefits of SSL on large unlabeled datasets, its utility on small datasets is relatively unexplored. We find that SSL reduces the relative error rate of few-shot meta-learners by 4%-27%, even when the datasets are small and only utilizing images within the datasets. The improvements are greater when the training set is smaller or the task is more challenging. Although the benefits of SSL may increase with larger training sets, we observe that SSL can hurt the pe…
Deep learning typically requires large data sets and much compute power for each new problem that is learned. Meta-learning can be used to learn a good prior that facilitates quick learning, thereby relaxing these requirements so that new tasks can be learned quicker; two popular approaches are MAML and the meta-learner LSTM. In this work, we compare the two and formally show that the meta-learner LSTM subsumes MAML. Combining this insight with recent empirical findings, we construct a new algorithm (dubbed TURTLE) which is simpler than the meta-learner LSTM yet more expressive than MAML. TURT…
Northwestern Polytechnical University of China（西北工业大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；JD Finance（京东金融）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
Deep learning based computer vision fails to work when labeled images are scarce. Recently, Meta learning algorithm has been confirmed as a promising way to improve the ability of learning from few images for computer vision. However, previous Meta learning approaches expose problems: 1) they ignored the importance of attention mechanism for the Meta learner; 2) they didn't give the Meta learner the ability of well using the past knowledge which can help to express images into high representations, resulting in that the Meta learner has to solve few shot learning task directly from the origina…
When data are scarce meta-learning can improve a learner's accuracy by harnessing previous experience from related learning tasks. However, existing methods have unreliable uncertainty estimates which are often overconfident. Addressing these shortcomings, we introduce a novel meta-learning framework, called F-PACOH, that treats meta-learned priors as stochastic processes and performs meta-level regularization directly in the function space. This allows us to directly steer the probabilistic predictions of the meta-learner towards high epistemic uncertainty in regions of insufficient meta-trai…
Few-shot learning remains challenging for meta-learning that learns a learning algorithm (meta-learner) from many related tasks. In this work, we argue that this is due to the lack of a good representation for meta-learning, and propose deep meta-learning to integrate the representation power of deep learning into meta-learning. The framework is composed of three modules, a concept generator, a meta-learner, and a concept discriminator, which are learned jointly. The concept generator, e.g. a deep residual net, extracts a representation for each instance that captures its high-level concept, o…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）
Model agnostic meta-learning algorithms aim to infer priors from several observed tasks that can then be used to adapt to a new task with few examples. Given the inherent diversity of tasks arising in existing benchmarks, recent methods use separate, learnable structure, such as hierarchies or graphs, for enabling task-specific adaptation of the prior. While these approaches have produced significantly better meta learners, our goal is to improve their performance when the heterogeneous task distribution contains challenging distribution shifts and semantic disparities. To this end, we introdu…
One-shot learning is usually tackled by using generative models or discriminative embeddings. Discriminative methods based on deep learning, which are very effective in other learning scenarios, are ill-suited for one-shot learning as they need large amounts of training data. In this paper, we propose a method to learn the parameters of a deep model in one shot. We construct the learner as a second deep network, called a learnet, which predicts the parameters of a pupil network from a single exemplar. In this manner we obtain an efficient feed-forward one-shot learner, trained end-to-end by mi…
AITRICS；Pohang University of Science and Technology（浦项科技大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
A meta-model is trained on a distribution of similar tasks such that it learns an algorithm that can quickly adapt to a novel task with only a handful of labeled examples. Most of current meta-learning methods assume that the meta-training set consists of relevant tasks sampled from a single distribution. In practice, however, a new task is often out of the task distribution, yielding a performance degradation. One way to tackle this problem is to construct an ensemble of meta-learners such that each meta-learner is trained on different task distribution. In this paper we present a method for …
Few-shot recognition involves training an image classifier to distinguish novel concepts at test time using few examples (shot). Existing approaches generally assume that the shot number at test time is known in advance. This is not realistic, and the performance of a popular and foundational method has been shown to suffer when train and test shots do not match. We conduct a systematic empirical study of this phenomenon. In line with prior work, we find that shot sensitivity is broadly present across metric-based few-shot learners, but in contrast to prior work, larger neural architectures pr…
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Focusing on discriminative zero-shot learning, in this work we introduce a novel mechanism that dynamically augments during training the set of seen classes to produce additional fictitious classes. These fictitious classes diminish the model's tendency to fixate during training on attribute correlations that appear in the training set but will not appear in newly exposed classes. The proposed model is tested within the two formulations of the zero-shot learning framework; namely, generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) and classical zero-shot learning (CZSL). Our model improves the state-of-the…
College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机学院）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
Graph classification aims to extract accurate information from graph-structured data for classification and is becoming more and more important in graph learning community. Although Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully applied to graph classification tasks, most of them overlook the scarcity of labeled graph data in many applications. For example, in bioinformatics, obtaining protein graph labels usually needs laborious experiments. Recently, few-shot learning has been explored to alleviate this problem with only given a few labeled graph samples of test classes. The shared sub-…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Large-scale pre-trained language models have contributed significantly to natural language processing by demonstrating remarkable abilities as few-shot learners. However, their effectiveness depends mainly on scaling the model parameters and prompt design, hindering their implementation in most real-world applications. This study proposes a novel pluggable, extensible, and efficient approach named DifferentiAble pRompT (DART), which can convert small language models into better few-shot learners without any prompt engineering. The main principle behind this approach involves reformulating pote…
Fully automating machine learning pipelines is one of the key challenges of current artificial intelligence research, since practical machine learning often requires costly and time-consuming human-powered processes such as model design, algorithm development, and hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, we verify that automated architecture search synergizes with the effect of gradient-based meta learning. We adopt the progressive neural architecture search \cite{liu:pnas_google:DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1712-00559} to find optimal architectures for meta-learners. The gradient based meta-learner wh…
