Bayesian Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning

Jaesik Yoon, Taesup Kim, Ousmane Dia, Sungwoong Kim, Yoshua Bengio, Sungjin Ahn

Abstract: Due to the inherent model uncertainty, learning to infer Bayesian posterior from a few-shot dataset is an important step towards robust meta-learning. In this paper, we propose a novel Bayesian model-agnostic meta-learning method. The proposed method combines efficient gradient-based meta-learning with nonparametric variational inference in a principled probabilistic framework. Unlike previous methods, during fast adaptation, the method is capable of learning complex uncertainty structure beyond a simple Gaussian approximation, and during meta-update, a novel Bayesian mechanism prevents meta-level overfitting. Remaining a gradient-based method, it is also the first Bayesian model-agnostic meta-learning method applicable to various tasks including reinforcement learning. Experiment results show the accuracy and robustness of the proposed method in sinusoidal regression, image classification, active learning, and reinforcement learning.