2014/02/24 by Ouais Alsharif, Philip Bachman, Alsharif, Ouais +4
Computer Science · #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning and Algorithms #Machine Learning and Data Classification #cs.LG
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1404.4108
8 pages
openalex publication_date 2014/02/24 · arxiv created 2014/07/09 · arxiv updated 2014/07/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Consider a Machine Learning Service Provider (MLSP) designed to rapidly create highly accurate learners for a never-ending stream of new tasks. The challenge is to produce task-specific learners that can be trained from few labeled samples, even if tasks are not uniquely identified, and the number of tasks and input dimensionality are large. In this paper, we argue that the MLSP should exploit knowledge from previous tasks to build a good representation of the environment it is in, and more precisely, that useful representations for such a service are ones that minimize generalization error for a new hypothesis trained on a new task. We formalize this intuition with a novel method that minimizes an empirical proxy of the intra-task small-sample generalization error. We present several empirical results showing state-of-the art performance on single-task transfer, multitask learning, and the full lifelong learning problem.