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Meta-SGD: Learning to Learn Quickly for Few-Shot Learning

Machine Learning 2017-09-29 v2

Abstract

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 implement, and can be learned more efficiently. Compared to the latest meta-learner MAML, Meta-SGD has a much higher capacity by learning to learn not just the learner initialization, but also the learner update direction and learning rate, all in a single meta-learning process. Meta-SGD shows highly competitive performance for few-shot learning on regression, classification, and reinforcement learning.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.09835,
  title  = {Meta-SGD: Learning to Learn Quickly for Few-Shot Learning},
  author = {Zhenguo Li and Fengwei Zhou and Fei Chen and Hang Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.09835},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

reinforcement learning included, 20-way classification on MiniImagenet included

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:02:15.680Z