SOTAVerified

Covariate Distribution Aware Meta-learning

2020-07-06ICML Workshop LifelongML 2020Code Available1· sign in to hype

Amrith Setlur, Saket Dingliwal, Barnabas Poczos

Code Available — Be the first to reproduce this paper.

Reproduce

Code

Abstract

Meta-learning has proven to be successful for few-shot learning across the regression, classification, and reinforcement learning paradigms. Recent approaches have adopted Bayesian interpretations to improve gradient-based meta-learners by quantifying the uncertainty of the post-adaptation estimates. Most of these works almost completely ignore the latent relationship between the covariate distribution (p(x)) of a task and the corresponding conditional distribution p(y|x). In this paper, we identify the need to explicitly model the meta-distribution over the task covariates in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. We begin by introducing a graphical model that leverages the samples from the marginal p(x) to better infer the posterior over the optimal parameters of the conditional distribution (p(y|x)) for each task. Based on this model we propose a computationally feasible meta-learning algorithm by introducing meaningful relaxations in our final objective. We demonstrate the gains of our algorithm over initialization based meta-learning baselines on popular classification benchmarks. Finally, to understand the potential benefit of modeling task covariates we further evaluate our method on a synthetic regression dataset.

Tasks

Reproductions