2021/03/30 by Giulia Denevi, Denevi, Giulia, Massimiliano Pontil +3 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human Pose and Action Recognition #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2103.16277
openalex publication_date 2021/03/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Standard meta-learning for representation learning aims to find a common representation to be shared across multiple tasks. The effectiveness of these methods is often limited when the nuances of the tasks' distribution cannot be captured by a single representation. In this work we overcome this issue by inferring a conditioning function, mapping the tasks' side information (such as the tasks' training dataset itself) into a representation tailored to the task at hand. We study environments in which our conditional strategy outperforms standard meta-learning, such as those in which tasks can be organized in separate clusters according to the representation they share. We then propose a meta-algorithm capable of leveraging this advantage in practice. In the unconditional setting, our method yields a new estimator enjoying faster learning rates and requiring less hyper-parameters to tune than current state-of-the-art methods. Our results are supported by preliminary experiments.