On Enforcing Better Conditioned Meta-Learning for Rapid Few-Shot Adaptation

Markus Hiller, Mehrtash Harandi, Tom Drummond

Keywords: Few-shot learning, meta-learning, condition number, preconditioning

Abstract: Inspired by the concept of preconditioning, we propose a novel method to increase adaptation speed for gradient-based meta-learning methods without incurring extra parameters. We demonstrate that recasting the optimisation problem to a non-linear least-squares formulation provides a principled way to actively enforce a well-conditioned parameter space for meta-learning models based on the concepts of the condition number and local curvature. Our comprehensive evaluations show that the proposed method significantly outperforms its unconstrained counterpart especially during initial adaptation steps, while achieving comparable or better overall results on several few-shot classification tasks – creating the possibility of dynamically choosing the number of adaptation steps at inference time.

TL;DR: Inspired by the concept of preconditioning, we propose a novel method to significantly increase adaptation speed for gradient-based meta-learning methods without incurring extra parameters.