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Learning to (Learn at Test Time)

Machine Learning 2024-01-09 v2

Abstract

We reformulate the problem of supervised learning as learning to learn with two nested loops (i.e. learning problems). The inner loop learns on each individual instance with self-supervision before final prediction. The outer loop learns the self-supervised task used by the inner loop, such that its final prediction improves. Our inner loop turns out to be equivalent to linear attention when the inner-loop learner is only a linear model, and to self-attention when it is a kernel estimator. For practical comparison with linear or self-attention layers, we replace each of them in a transformer with an inner loop, so our outer loop is equivalent to training the architecture. When each inner-loop learner is a neural network, our approach vastly outperforms transformers with linear attention on ImageNet from 224 x 224 raw pixels in both accuracy and FLOPs, while (regular) transformers cannot run.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.13807,
  title  = {Learning to (Learn at Test Time)},
  author = {Yu Sun and Xinhao Li and Karan Dalal and Chloe Hsu and Sanmi Koyejo and Carlos Guestrin and Xiaolong Wang and Tatsunori Hashimoto and Xinlei Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.13807},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Fixed a few small typos

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:57:19.368Z