Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, seeks to design algorithms that can utilize previous experience to rapidly learn new skills or adapt to new environments. Representation learning -- a key tool for performing meta-learning -- learns a data representation that can transfer knowledge across multiple tasks, which is essential in regimes where data is scarce. Despite a recent surge of interest in the practice of meta-learning, the theoretical underpinnings of meta-learning algorithms are lacking, especially in the context of learning transferable representations. In this paper, we focus on the problem of multi-task linear regression -- in which multiple linear regression models share a common, low-dimensional linear representation. Here, we provide provably fast, sample-efficient algorithms to address the dual challenges of (1) learning a common set of features from multiple, related tasks, and (2) transferring this knowledge to new, unseen tasks. Both are central to the general problem of meta-learning. Finally, we complement these results by providing information-theoretic lower bounds on the sample complexity of learning these linear features.
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Standard meta-learning for representation learning aims to find a common representation to be shared across multiple tasks. The effectiveness of these methods is often limited when the nuances of the tasks' distribution cannot be captured by a single representation. In this work we overcome this issue by inferring a conditioning function, mapping the tasks' side information (such as the tasks' training dataset itself) into a representation tailored to the task at hand. We study environments in which our conditional strategy outperforms standard meta-learning, such as those in which tasks can be organized in separate clusters according to the representation they share. We then propose a meta-algorithm capable of leveraging this advantage in practice. In the unconditional setting, our method yields a new estimator enjoying faster learning rates and requiring less hyper-parameters to tune than current state-of-the-art methods. Our results are supported by preliminary experiments.
This paper studies few-shot learning via representation learning, where one uses $T$ source tasks with $n_1$ data per task to learn a representation in order to reduce the sample complexity of a target task for which there is only $n_2 (\ll n_1)$ data. Specifically, we focus on the setting where there exists a good \emph{common representation} between source and target, and our goal is to understand how much of a sample size reduction is possible. First, we study the setting where this common representation is low-dimensional and provide a fast rate of $O\left(\frac{\mathcal{C}\left(\Phi\right)}{n_1T} + \frac{k}{n_2}\right)$; here, $\Phi$ is the representation function class, $\mathcal{C}\left(\Phi\right)$ is its complexity measure, and $k$ is the dimension of the representation. When specialized to linear representation functions, this rate becomes $O\left(\frac{dk}{n_1T} + \frac{k}{n_2}\right)$ where $d (\gg k)$ is the ambient input dimension, which is a substantial improvement over the rate without using representation learning, i.e. over the rate of $O\left(\frac{d}{n_2}\right)$. This result bypasses the $\Omega(\frac{1}{T})$ barrier under the i.i.d. task assumption, and can capture the desired property that all $n_1T$ samples from source tasks can be \emph{pooled} together for representation learning. Next, we consider the setting where the common representation may be high-dimensional but is capacity-constrained (say in norm); here, we again demonstrate the advantage of representation learning in both high-dimensional linear regression and neural network learning. Our results demonstrate representation learning can fully utilize all $n_1T$ samples from source tasks.
Clustering is one of the most fundamental and wide-spread techniques in exploratory data analysis. Yet, the basic approach to clustering has not really changed: a practitioner hand-picks a task-specific clustering loss to optimize and fit the given data to reveal the underlying cluster structure. Some types of losses---such as k-means, or its non-linear version: kernelized k-means (centroid based), and DBSCAN (density based)---are popular choices due to their good empirical performance on a range of applications. Although every so often the clustering output using these standard losses fails to reveal the underlying structure, and the practitioner has to custom-design their own variation. In this work we take an intrinsically different approach to clustering: rather than fitting a dataset to a specific clustering loss, we train a recurrent model that learns how to cluster. The model uses as training pairs examples of datasets (as input) and its corresponding cluster identities (as output). By providing multiple types of training datasets as inputs, our model has the ability to generalize well on unseen datasets (new clustering tasks). Our experiments reveal that by training on simple synthetically generated datasets or on existing real datasets, we can achieve better clustering performance on unseen real-world datasets when compared with standard benchmark clustering techniques. Our meta clustering model works well even for small datasets where the usual deep learning models tend to perform worse.
Meta-learning extracts the common knowledge acquired from learning different tasks and uses it for unseen tasks. It demonstrates a clear advantage on tasks that have insufficient training data, e.g., few-shot learning. In most meta-learning methods, tasks are implicitly related via the shared model or optimizer. In this paper, we show that a meta-learner that explicitly relates tasks on a graph describing the relations of their output dimensions (e.g., classes) can significantly improve the performance of few-shot learning. This type of graph is usually free or cheap to obtain but has rarely been explored in previous works. We study the prototype based few-shot classification, in which a prototype is generated for each class, such that the nearest neighbor search between the prototypes produces an accurate classification. We introduce "Gated Propagation Network (GPN)", which learns to propagate messages between prototypes of different classes on the graph, so that learning the prototype of each class benefits from the data of other related classes. In GPN, an attention mechanism is used for the aggregation of messages from neighboring classes, and a gate is deployed to choose between the aggregated messages and the message from the class itself. GPN is trained on a sequence of tasks from many-shot to few-shot generated by subgraph sampling. During training, it is able to reuse and update previously achieved prototypes from the memory in a life-long learning cycle. In experiments, we change the training-test discrepancy and test task generation settings for thorough evaluations. GPN outperforms recent meta-learning methods on two benchmark datasets in all studied cases.
Text classification tends to be difficult when the data is deficient or when it is required to adapt to unseen classes. In such challenging scenarios, recent studies have often used meta-learning to simulate the few-shot task, thus negating explicit common linguistic features across tasks. Deep language representations have proven to be very effective forms of unsupervised pretraining, yielding contextualized features that capture linguistic properties and benefit downstream natural language understanding tasks. However, the effect of pretrained language representation for few-shot learning on text classification tasks is still not well understood. In this study, we design a few-shot learning model with pretrained language representations and report the empirical results. We show that our approach is not only simple but also produces state-of-the-art performance on a well-studied sentiment classification dataset. It can thus be further suggested that pretraining could be a promising solution for few shot learning of many other NLP tasks. The code and the dataset to replicate the experiments are made available at //github.com/zxlzr/FewShotNLP.
Meta learning is a promising solution to few-shot learning problems. However, existing meta learning methods are restricted to the scenarios where training and application tasks share the same out-put structure. To obtain a meta model applicable to the tasks with new structures, it is required to collect new training data and repeat the time-consuming meta training procedure. This makes them inefficient or even inapplicable in learning to solve heterogeneous few-shot learning tasks. We thus develop a novel and principled HierarchicalMeta Learning (HML) method. Different from existing methods that only focus on optimizing the adaptability of a meta model to similar tasks, HML also explicitly optimizes its generalizability across heterogeneous tasks. To this end, HML first factorizes a set of similar training tasks into heterogeneous ones and trains the meta model over them at two levels to maximize adaptation and generalization performance respectively. The resultant model can then directly generalize to new tasks. Extensive experiments on few-shot classification and regression problems clearly demonstrate the superiority of HML over fine-tuning and state-of-the-art meta learning approaches in terms of generalization across heterogeneous tasks.
Knowledge Transfer (KT) techniques tackle the problem of transferring the knowledge from a large and complex neural network into a smaller and faster one. However, existing KT methods are tailored towards classification tasks and they cannot be used efficiently for other representation learning tasks. In this paper a novel knowledge transfer technique, that is capable of training a student model that maintains the same amount of mutual information between the learned representation and a set of (possible unknown) labels as the teacher model, is proposed. Apart from outperforming existing KT techniques, the proposed method allows for overcoming several limitations of existing methods providing new insight into KT as well as novel KT applications, ranging from knowledge transfer from handcrafted feature extractors to {cross-modal} KT from the textual modality into the representation extracted from the visual modality of the data.
One of the key limitations of modern deep learning based approaches lies in the amount of data required to train them. Humans, on the other hand, can learn to recognize novel categories from just a few examples. Instrumental to this rapid learning ability is the compositional structure of concept representations in the human brain - something that deep learning models are lacking. In this work we make a step towards bridging this gap between human and machine learning by introducing a simple regularization technique that allows the learned representation to be decomposable into parts. We evaluate the proposed approach on three datasets: CUB-200-2011, SUN397, and ImageNet, and demonstrate that our compositional representations require fewer examples to learn classifiers for novel categories, outperforming state-of-the-art few-shot learning approaches by a significant margin.
Gradient-based meta-learning techniques are both widely applicable and proficient at solving challenging few-shot learning and fast adaptation problems. However, they have the practical difficulties of operating in high-dimensional parameter spaces in extreme low-data regimes. We show that it is possible to bypass these limitations by learning a low-dimensional latent generative representation of model parameters and performing gradient-based meta-learning in this space with latent embedding optimization (LEO), effectively decoupling the gradient-based adaptation procedure from the underlying high-dimensional space of model parameters. Our evaluation shows that LEO can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the competitive 5-way 1-shot miniImageNet classification task.
Meta-learning enables a model to learn from very limited data to undertake a new task. In this paper, we study the general meta-learning with adversarial samples. We present a meta-learning algorithm, ADML (ADversarial Meta-Learner), which leverages clean and adversarial samples to optimize the initialization of a learning model in an adversarial manner. ADML leads to the following desirable properties: 1) it turns out to be very effective even in the cases with only clean samples; 2) it is model-agnostic, i.e., it is compatible with any learning model that can be trained with gradient descent; and most importantly, 3) it is robust to adversarial samples, i.e., unlike other meta-learning methods, it only leads to a minor performance degradation when there are adversarial samples. We show via extensive experiments that ADML delivers the state-of-the-art performance on two widely-used image datasets, MiniImageNet and CIFAR100, in terms of both accuracy and robustness.
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