Rethinking the Number of Shots in Robust Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning

18 Sept 2023 (modified: 25 Mar 2024)ICLR 2024 Conference Withdrawn SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Keywords: few-shot learning, model-agnostic meta-learning, adversarial robustness
Abstract: Robust Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is usually adopted to train a meta-model which may fast adapt to novel classes with only a few exemplars and meanwhile remain robust to adversarial attacks. The conventional solution for robust MAML is to introduce robustness-promoting regularization during meta-training stage. However, although the robustness can be largely improved, previous methods sacrifice clean accuracy a lot. In this paper, we observe that introducing robustness-promoting regularization into MAML reduces the intrinsic dimension of clean sample features, which results in a lower capacity of clean representations. This may explain why the clean accuracy of previous robust MAML methods drops severely. Based on this observation, we propose a simple strategy, i.e., setting the number of training shots larger than that of test shots, to mitigate the loss of intrinsic dimension caused by robustness-promoting regularization. Though simple, our method remarkably improves the clean accuracy of MAML without much loss of robustness, producing a robust yet accurate model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms prior arts in achieving a better trade-off between accuracy and robustness. Besides, we observe that our method is less sensitive to the number of fine-tuning steps during training, which allows for a reduced number of fine-tuning steps to improve training efficiency.
Primary Area: transfer learning, meta learning, and lifelong learning
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Submission Number: 1100
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