In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.

A central capability of intelligent systems is the ability to continuously build upon previous experiences to speed up and enhance learning of new tasks. Two distinct research paradigms have studied this question. Meta-learning views this problem as learning a prior over model parameters that is amenable for fast adaptation on a new task, but typically assumes the set of tasks are available together as a batch. In contrast, online (regret based) learning considers a sequential setting in which problems are revealed one after the other, but conventionally train only a single model without any task-specific adaptation. This work introduces an online meta-learning setting, which merges ideas from both the aforementioned paradigms to better capture the spirit and practice of continual lifelong learning. We propose the follow the meta leader (FTML) algorithm which extends the MAML algorithm to this setting. Theoretically, this work provides an O(logT) regret guarantee for the FTML algorithm. Our experimental evaluation on three different large-scale tasks suggest that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms alternatives based on traditional online learning approaches.
We introduce the online meta learning problem setting to better capture the spirit and practice of continual lifelong learning.

The novel \emph{Unbiased Online Recurrent Optimization} (UORO) algorithm allows for online learning of general recurrent computational graphs such as recurrent network models. It works in a streaming fashion and avoids backtracking through past activations and inputs. UORO is computationally as costly as \emph{Truncated Backpropagation Through Time} (truncated BPTT), a widespread algorithm for online learning of recurrent networks \cite{jaeger2002tutorial}.  UORO is a modification of \emph{NoBackTrack} \cite{DBLP:journals/corr/OllivierC15} that bypasses the need for model sparsity and makes implementation easy in current deep learning frameworks, even for complex models.   Like NoBackTrack, UORO provides unbiased gradient estimates; unbiasedness is the core hypothesis in stochastic gradient descent theory, without which convergence to a local optimum is not guaranteed. On the contrary, truncated BPTT does not provide this property, leading to possible divergence.   On synthetic tasks where truncated BPTT is shown to diverge, UORO converges. For instance, when a parameter has a positive short-term but negative long-term influence, truncated BPTT diverges unless the truncation span is very significantly longer than the intrinsic temporal range of the interactions, while UORO performs well thanks to the unbiasedness of its gradients.

Introduces an online, unbiased and easily implementable gradient estimate for recurrent models.

In probabilistic classification, a discriminative model based on Gaussian mixture exhibits flexible fitting capability. Nevertheless, it is difficult to determine the number of components. We propose a sparse classifier based on a discriminative Gaussian mixture model (GMM), which is named sparse discriminative Gaussian mixture (SDGM). In the SDGM, a GMM-based discriminative model is trained by sparse Bayesian learning. This learning algorithm improves the generalization capability by obtaining a sparse solution and automatically determines the number of components by removing redundant components. The SDGM can be embedded into neural networks (NNs) such as convolutional NNs and can be trained in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results indicated that the proposed method prevented overfitting by obtaining sparsity. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the proposed method outperformed a fully connected layer with the softmax function in certain cases when it was used as the last layer of a deep NN.

A sparse classifier based on a discriminative Gaussian mixture model, which can also be embedded into a neural network.