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arXiv · 1902.10644

Provable Guarantees for Gradient-Based Meta-Learning

Mikhail Khodak·Maria-Florina Balcan·Ameet Talwalkar
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Abstract

We study the problem of meta-learning through the lens of online convex optimization, developing a meta-algorithm bridging the gap between popular gradient-based meta-learning and classical regularization-based multi-task transfer methods. Our method is the first to simultaneously satisfy good sample efficiency guarantees in the convex setting, with generalization bounds that improve with task-similarity, while also being computationally scalable to modern deep learning architectures and the many-task setting. Despite its simplicity, the algorithm matches, up to a constant factor, a lower bound on the performance of any such parameter-transfer method under natural task similarity assumptions. We use experiments in both convex and deep learning settings to verify and demonstrate the applicability of our theory.

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Mikhail Khodak, Maria-Florina Balcan, Ameet Talwalkar. 2019-02-27. Provable Guarantees for Gradient-Based Meta-Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.10644

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