Meta-Learning with Neural Tangent Kernels

1 INTRODUCTION . Meta-learning ( Schmidhuber , 1987 ) has made tremendous progresses in the last few years . It aims to learn abstract knowledge from many related tasks so that fast adaption to new and unseen tasks becomes possible . For example , in few-shot learning , meta-learning corresponds to learning a meta-model or meta-parameters so that they can fast adapt to new tasks with a limited number of data samples . Among all existing meta-learning methods , Model Agnostic Meta-Learning ( MAML ) ( Finn et al. , 2017 ) is perhaps one of the most popular and flexible ones , with a number of follow-up works such as ( Nichol et al. , 2018 ; Finn et al. , 2018 ; Yao et al. , 2019 ; Khodak et al. , 2019a ; b ; Denevi et al. , 2019 ; Fallah et al. , 2020 ; Lee et al. , 2020 ; Tripuraneni et al. , 2020 ) . MAML adopts a double-looped optimization framework , where adaptation is achieved by one or several gradientdescent steps in the inner-loop optimization . Such a framework could lead to some undesirable issues related to computational inefficiency and sub-optimal solutions . The main reasons are that 1 ) it is computationally expensive to back-propagate through a stochastic-gradient-descent chain , and 2 ) it is hard to tune the number of adaptation steps in the inner-loop as it can be different for both training and testing . Several previous works tried to address these issues , but they can only alleviate them to certain extents . For example , first order MAML ( FOMAML ) ( Finn et al. , 2017 ) ignores the high-order terms of the standard MAML , which can speed up the training but may lead to deteriorated performance ; MAML with Implicit Gradient ( iMAML ) ( Rajeswaran et al. , 2019 ) directly minimizes the objective of the outer-loop without performing the inner-loop optimization . But it still needs an iterative solver to estimate the meta-gradient . To better address these issues , we propose two algorithms that generalize meta-learning to the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space ( RKHS ) induced by the meta-model ’ s Neural Tangent Kernel ( NTK ) ( Jacot et al. , 2018 ) . In this RKHS , instead of using parameter adaptation , we propose to perform an implicit function adaptation . To this end , we introduce two algorithms to avoid explicit ∗The first two authors contribute equally . Correspondence to Changyou Chen ( changyou @ buffalo.edu ) . †The research of the first and fifth authors was supported in part by NSF through grants CCF-1716400 and IIS-1910492 . function adaptation : one replaces the function adaptation step in the inner-loop with a new metaobjective with a fast-adaptive regularizer inspired by MAML ; the other solves the adaptation problem analytically based on tools from NTK so that the meta-objective can be directly evaluated on samples in a closed-form . When restricting the function space to be RKHS , the solutions to the proposed two algorithms become conveniently solvable . In addition , we provide theoretical analysis on our proposed algorithms in the cases of using fully-connected neural networks and convolutional neural networks as the meta-model . Our analysis shows close connections between our methods and the existing ones . Particularly , we prove that one of our algorithms is closely related to MAML with some high-order terms ignored in the meta-objective function , thus endowing effective optimization . In summary , our main contributions are : • We re-analyze the meta-learning problem and introduce two new algorithms for metalearning in RKHS . Different from all existing meta-learning algorithms , our proposed methods can be solved efficiently without cumbersome chain-based adaptations . • We conduct theoretically analysis on the proposed algorithms , which suggests that our pro- posed algorithms are closely related to the existing MAML methods when fully-connected neural networks and convolutional neural networks are used as the meta-model . • We conduct extensive experiments to validate our algorithms . Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of our proposed methods , through standard few-shot learning , robustness to adversarial attacks and out-of-distribution adaptation . 2 PRELIMINARIES . 2.1 META-LEARNING . Meta-learning can be roughly categorized as black-box adaptation methods ( Andrychowicz et al. , 2016 ; Graves et al. , 2014 ; Mishra et al. , 2018 ) , optimization-based methods ( Finn et al. , 2017 ) , non-parametric methods ( Vinyals et al. , 2016 ; Snell et al. , 2017 ; Triantafillou et al. , 2020 ) and Bayesian meta-learning methods ( Finn et al. , 2018 ; Yoon et al. , 2018 ; Ravi & Beatson , 2019 ) . In this paper , we focus on the framework of Model Agnostic Meta-Learning ( MAML ) ( Finn et al. , 2017 ) , which has two key components , meta initialization and fast adaptation . Specifically , MAML solves the meta-learning problem through a double-looped optimization procedure . In the inner-loop , MAML runs a task-specific adaptation procedure to transform a meta-parameter , θ , to a task-specific parameter , { φm } Bm=1 , for a total of B different tasks . In the outer-loop , MAML minimizes a total loss of ∑B m=1 L ( fφm ) with respect to meta-parameter θ , where fφm is the model adapted on task m that is typically represented by a deep neural network . It is worth noting that in MAML , one potential problem is to compute the meta-gradient∇θ ∑B m=1 L ( fφm ) . It requires one to differentiate through the whole inner-loop optimization path , which could be very inefficient . 2.2 GRADIENT FLOW . Our proposed method relies on the concept of gradient flow . Generally speaking , gradient flow is a continuous-time version of gradient descent . In the finite-dimensional parameter space , a gradient flow is defined by an ordinary differential equation ( ODE ) , dθt/dt = −∇θtF ( θt ) , with a starting point θ0 and function F : Rd → R. Gradient flow is also known as steepest descent curve . One can generalize gradient flows to infinite-dimensional function spaces . Specifically , given a function spaceH , a functional F : H → R , and a starting point f0 ∈ H , a gradient flow is similarly defined as the solution of df t/dt = −∇ftF ( f t ) . This is a curve in the function space H. In this paper , we use notation∇ftF ( f t ) , instead of∇HF ( f t ) , to denote the general function derivative of the energy functional F with respect to function f t ( Villani , 2008 ) . 2.3 THE NEURAL TANGENT KERNEL . Neural Tangent Kernel ( NTK ) is a recently proposed technique for characterizing the dynamics of a neural network under gradient descent ( Jacot et al. , 2018 ; Arora et al. , 2019 ; Lee et al. , 2019 ) . NTK allows one to analyze deep neural networks ( DNNs ) in RKHS induced by NTK . One immediate benefit of this is that the loss functional in the function space is often convex , even when it is highly non-convex in the parameter space ( Jacot et al. , 2018 ) ∗ . This property allows one to better understand the property of DNNs . Specifically , let fθ be a DNN parameterized by θ . The corresponding NTK Θ ∗LetH be the function space , F be the realization function for neural network defined in Section 3.2 . Note even if a functional loss ( e.g. , L2 loss ) E : H → R is convex onH , the composition E ◦ F is in general not . is defined as : Θ ( x1 , x2 ) = ∂fθ ( x1 ) ∂θ ∂fθ ( x2 ) ∂θ ᵀ , where x1 , x2 are two data points . In our paper , we will define meta-learning on an RKHS induced by such a kernel . 3 META-LEARNING IN RKHS . We first define the meta-learning problem in a general function space , and then restrict the function space to be an RKHS , where two frameworks will be proposed to make meta-learning feasible in RKHS , along with some theoretical analysis . For simplicity , in the following we will hide the superscript time t unless necessary , e.g. , when the analysis involves time-changing . 3.1 META-LEARNING IN FUNCTION SPACE . Given a function space H , a distribution of tasks P ( T ) , and a loss function L , the goal of metalearning is to find a meta function f∗ ∈ H , so that it performs well after simple adaptation on a specific task . Let Dtrm and Dtestm be the training and testing sets , respectively , sampled from a data distribution of task Tm . The meta-learning problem on function spaceH is defined as : f∗ = arg min f∈H E ( f ) , with E ( f ) = ETm [ L ( Adapt ( f , Dtrm ) , Dtestm ) ] ( 1 ) where Adapt denotes some adaptation algorithms , e.g. , several steps of gradient descent ; E : H → R is called energy functional , which is used to evaluate the model represented by the function f . In theory , solving equation 1 is equivalent to solving the gradient flow equation df t/dt = −∇ftE ( f t ) . However , solving the gradient flow equation is generally infeasible , since i ) it is hard to directly apply optimization methods in function space and ii ) the energy functional E contains an adaptation algorithm Adapt , making the functional gradient infeasible . Thus , a better way is to design a special energy functional so that it can be directly optimized without running the specific adaptation algorithm . In the following , we first specify the functional meta-learning problem in RKHS , and then propose two methods to derive efficient solutions for the problem . 3.2 META-LEARNING IN RKHS . We consider a function f that is parameterized by θ ∈ RP , denoted as fθ , with P being the number of parameters . Define a realization function F : RP → H that maps parameters to a function . With these , we can then define an energy function in the parameter space as E , E ◦ F : RP → R with ◦ being the composition operator . Consequently , with an initialized θ0 , we can define the gradient flow of E ( θt ) in parameter space as : dθt/dt = −∇θtE ( θt ) . In the following , we first establish an equivalence between the gradient flow in RKHS and the gradient flow in the parameter space . We then propose two algorithms for meta-learning in the RKHS induced by NTK . Theorem 1 Let H be an RKHS induced by the NTK Θ of fθ . With f0 = fθ0 , the gradient flow of E ( f t ) coincides with the function evolution of fθt driven by the gradient flow of E ( θt ) . The proof of Theorem 1 relies on the property of NTK ( Jacot et al. , 2018 ) , and is provided in the Appendix . Theorem 1 serves as a foundation of our proposed methods , which indicates that solving the meta-learning problem in RKHS can be done by some appropriate manipulations . In the following , we describe two different approaches termed Meta-RKHS-I and Meta-RKHS-II , respectively . 3.3 META-RKHS-I : META-LEARNING IN RKHS WITHOUT ADAPTATION . Our goal is to design an energy functional that has no adaptation component , but is capable of achieving fast adaptation . For this purpose , we first introduce two definitions : empirical loss function L ( fθ , Dm ) and expected loss function L ( fθ ) . Let Dm = { xm , i , ym , i } ni=1 be a set containing the data of a regression task Tm . The empirical loss function L ( fθ , Dm ) and the expected loss function Lm ( fθ ) can be defined as : L ( fθ , Dm ) = 1 2n n∑ i=1 ∥∥f ( xm , i ) − ym , i ∥∥2 , Lm ( fθ ) = Exm , ym [ 12∥∥f ( xm ) − ym ∥∥2 ] . Our idea is to define a regularized functional such that it endows the ability of fast adaptation in RKHS . Our solution is based on some property of the standard MAML . We start from analyzing the meta-objective of MAML with a k-step gradient-descent adaptation , i.e. , applying k gradient-descent steps in the inner-loop . The objective can be formulated as θ∗ = arg min θ ETm [ L ( fφ , Dtestm ) ] , with φ = θ − α k−1∑ i=0 ∇θiL ( fθi , Dtrm ) , where α is the learning rate of the inner-loop , θ0 = θ , and θi+1 = θi − α∇θiL ( fθi , Dtrm ) † . By Taylor expansion , we have ETm [ L ( fφ , Dtestm ) ] ≈ ETm [ L ( fθ , Dtestm ) − α k−1∑ i=0 ∇θiL ( fθi , Dtrm ) ∇θL ( fθ , Dtestm ) ᵀ ] . ( 2 ) Since Dtrm and Dtestm come from the same distribution , equation 2 is an unbiased estimator of Mk = ETm [ Lm ( fθ ) − k−1∑ i=0 βi ] , where βi = α∇θiLm ( fθi ) ∇θLm ( fθ ) ᵀ . ( 3 ) We focus on the case of k = 1 , which is M1 = ETm [ Lm ( fθ ) ] − αETm [ ‖∇θLm ( fθ ) ‖2 ] . The first term on the RHS is the traditional multi-task loss evaluated at θ for all tasks . The second term corresponds to the negative gradient norm ; minimizing it means choosing a θ with the maximum gradient norm . Intuitively , when θ is not a stationary point of a task , one should choose the steepest descent direction to reduce the loss maximally for a specific task , thus leading to fast adaptation . The above understanding suggests us to propose the following regularized energy functional , Ẽα , for meta-learning in the RKHS induced with the NTK for fast function adaptation : Ẽ ( α , fθ ) = ETm [ Lm ( fθ ) − α‖∇fθLm ( fθ ) ‖2H ] , ( 4 ) where ‖ · ‖H denotes the functional norm inH , and α is a hyper-parameter . The above objective is inspired by the Taylor expansion of the MAML objective , but is defined in the RKHS induced by the NTK . Its connection with MAML and some functional-space properties will be discussed later . Solving the Function Optimization Problem To minimize equation 4 , we first derive Theorem 2 to reduce the function optimization problem to a parameter optimization problem . Theorem 2 Let fθ be a neural network with parameter θ andH be the RKHS induced by the NTK Θ of fθ . Then , the following are equivalent Ẽ ( α , fθ ) =M1 , and ‖∇fθLm ( fθ ) ‖2H = ‖∇θLm ( fθ ) ‖2 . Theorem 2 is crucial to our approach as it indicates that solving problem equation 4 is no more difficult than the original parameter-based MAML , although it only considers one-step adaptation case . Next , we will show that multi-step adaptation in the parameter space can also be well-approximated by our objective equation 4 but with a scaled regularized parameter α . In the following , we consider the squared loss L. The case with the cross-entropy loss is discussed in the Appendix . We assume that fθ is parameterized by either fully-connected or convolutional neural networks , and only consider the impact of number of hidden layers L in our theoretical results . Theorem 3 Let fθ be a fully-connected neural network with L hidden layers and ReLU activation function , s1 , ... , sL+1 be the spectral norm of the weight matrices , s = maxh sh , andα be the learning rate of gradient descent . If α ≤ O ( qr ) with q = min ( 1/ ( LsL ) , L−1/ ( L+1 ) ) and r = min ( s−L , s ) , then the following holds |Mk − Ẽ ( kα , fθ ) | ≤ O ( 1 L ) . Theorem 4 Let fθ be a convolutional neural network with L − l convolutional layers and l fullyconnected layers and with ReLU activation function , and dx be the input dimension . Denote by Wh the parameter vector of the convolutional layer for h ≤ L− l , and the weight matrices of the fully connected layers for L− l + 1 ≤ h ≤ L+ 1 . ‖ · ‖2 means both the spectral norm of a matrix †For ease of our later notation , we write the gradient∇θiL ( thus the parameter as well ) as a row vector . and the Euclidean norm of a vector . Define sh = √ dx‖Wh‖2 if h = 1 , ... , L − l , and ‖Wh‖2 if L − l + 1 ≤ h ≤ L + 1 . Let s = maxh sh and α be the learning rate of gradient descent . If α ≤ O ( qr ) with q = min ( 1/ ( LsL ) , L−1/ ( L+1 ) ) and r = min ( s−L , s ) , the following holds |Mk − Ẽ ( kα , fθ ) | ≤ O ( 1 L ) . The above Theorems indicate that , for a meta-model with fully-connected and convolutional layers , the proposed Meta-RKHS-I can be an efficient approximation of MAML with a bounded error . Comparisons with Reptile and MAML Similar to Reptile and MAML , the testing stage of MetaRKHS-I also requires gradient-based adaptation on meta-test tasks . By Theorem 1 , we known that gradient flow of an energy functional can be approximated by gradient descent in a parameter space . Reptile with 1-step adaptation ( Nichol et al. , 2018 ) is equivalent to the approximation of the gradient flow of Ẽ ( α , fθ ) with α = 0 , which does not include the fast-adaptation regularization as in our method . For a fairer comparison on the efficiency , we will discuss the computational complexity later . From the equivalent parameter-optimization form indicated in Theorem 2 , we know that our energy functional Ẽ ( α , fθ ) is closely related to MAML . However , with this form , our method does not need the explicit adaptation steps in training ( i.e. , the inner-loop of MAML ) , leading to a simpler optimization problem . We will show that our proposed method leads to better results .

Summary: The authors propose two meta-learning algorithms in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) induced by the recently proposed Neural Tangent Kernels (NTK). The authors show how their algorithms obviate an explicit inner loop or task-adaptation step in the meta-learning training phase. In first algorithm, no explicit adaptation function is used, whereas in the second, a close form adaptation function which invokes the NTK is proposed - which is a simpler adaptation than that of MAML and hence, offers computational efficiency. The work is interesting and  supported by theory inspired from the NTK theory, and adds to the newly expanding literature in the use of kernels in meta-learning (unlike the authors’ claim in the introduction, theirs is not the first meta-learning paradigm in the RKHS cf (Wang et al 2020, Cerviño et al 2019)). The authors perform extensive experiments on regression and classification datasets and compare their results with other MAML-type algorithms. The experimental results do not show significant gains in terms of performance over the existing MAML approaches, except in the case of out-of-distribution datasets and adversarial attacks, where it is shown to outperform the others. The performance similarity to other methods is not surprising since the proposed approaches can be seen as an efficient approximations of the MAML.