Meta-Learning with Latent Embedding Optimization
Authors: Andrei A. Rusu, Dushyant Rao, Jakub Sygnowski, Oriol Vinyals, Razvan Pascanu, Simon Osindero, Raia Hadsell
Keywords: meta-learning, few-shot, miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, hypernetworks, generative, latent embedding, optimization
TL;DR: Latent Embedding Optimization (LEO) is a novel gradient-based meta-learner with state-of-the-art performance on the challenging 5-way 1-shot and 5-shot miniImageNet and tieredImageNet classification tasks.
Abstract: Gradient-based meta-learning techniques are both widely applicable and proficient at solving challenging few-shot learning and fast adaptation problems. However, they have practical difficulties when operating on high-dimensional parameter spaces in extreme low-data regimes. We show that it is possible to bypass these limitations by learning a data-dependent latent generative representation of model parameters, and performing gradient-based meta-learning in this low-dimensional latent space. The resulting approach, latent embedding optimization (LEO), decouples the gradient-based adaptation procedure from the underlying high-dimensional space of model parameters. Our evaluation shows that LEO can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the competitive miniImageNet and tieredImageNet few-shot classification tasks. Further analysis indicates LEO is able to capture uncertainty in the data, and can perform adaptation more effectively by optimizing in latent space.