English

Generalization Bounds For Meta-Learning: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

Machine Learning 2021-12-13 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

We derive a novel information-theoretic analysis of the generalization property of meta-learning algorithms. Concretely, our analysis proposes a generic understanding of both the conventional learning-to-learn framework and the modern model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) algorithms. Moreover, we provide a data-dependent generalization bound for a stochastic variant of MAML, which is non-vacuous for deep few-shot learning. As compared to previous bounds that depend on the square norm of gradients, empirical validations on both simulated data and a well-known few-shot benchmark show that our bound is orders of magnitude tighter in most situations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.14595,
  title  = {Generalization Bounds For Meta-Learning: An Information-Theoretic Analysis},
  author = {Qi Chen and Changjian Shui and Mario Marchand},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.14595},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:29:28.284Z