Few-Shot Regression via Learning Sparsifying Basis Functions

Yi Loo, Yiluan Guo, Ngai-Man Cheung

TL;DR: We propose a method of doing few-shot regression by learning a set of basis functions to represent the function distribution.

Abstract: Recent few-shot learning algorithms have enabled models to quickly adapt to new tasks based on only a few training samples. Previous few-shot learning works have mainly focused on classification and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a few-shot meta-learning system that focuses exclusively on regression tasks. Our model is based on the idea that the degree of freedom of the unknown function can be significantly reduced if it is represented as a linear combination of a set of sparsifying basis functions. This enables a few labeled samples to approximate the function. We design a Basis Function Learner network to encode basis functions for a task distribution, and a Weights Generator network to generate the weight vector for a novel task. We show that our model outperforms the current state of the art meta-learning methods in various regression tasks.

Code: https://github.com/fewshotreg/Few-Shot-Regression.git

Keywords: meta-learning, few-shot learning, regression, learning basis functions, self-attention