On sensitivity of meta-learning to support data

Mayank Agarwal, Mikhail Yurochkin, Yuekai Sun

Keywords: meta-learning, sensitivity, robustness

TL;DR: We demonstrate that meta-learning algorithms applied to few-shot learning are extremely sensitive to the support data.

Abstract: Meta-learning algorithms are widely used for few-shot learning. For example, image recognition systems that readily adapt to unseen classes after seeing only a few labeled examples. Despite their success, we show that modern meta-learning algorithms are extremely sensitive to the data used for adaptation, i.e. support data. In particular, we demonstrate the existence of (unaltered, in-distribution, natural) images that, when used for adaptation, yield accuracy as low as 4\% or as high as 95\% on standard few-shot image classification benchmarks. We explain our empirical findings in terms of class margins, which in turn suggests that robust and safe meta-learning requires larger margins than supervised learning.

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