{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/alpaca-vs-gp-based-prior-learning-a","title":"ALPaCA vs. GP-based Prior Learning: A Comparison between two Bayesian Meta-Learning Algorithms","arxiv_id":"2010.07994","date":"2020-10-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["YiLun Wu"],"abstract":"Meta-learning or few-shot learning, has been successfully applied in a wide range of domains from computer vision to reinforcement learning. Among the many frameworks proposed for meta-learning, bayesian methods are particularly favoured when accurate and calibrated uncertainty estimate is required. In this paper, we investigate the similarities and disparities among two recently published bayesian meta-learning methods: ALPaCA (Harrison et al. [2018]) and PACOH (Rothfuss et al. [2020]). We provide theoretical analysis as well as empirical benchmarks across synthetic and real-world dataset. While ALPaCA holds advantage in computation time by the usage of a linear kernel, general GP-based methods provide much more flexibility and achieves better result across datasets when using a common kernel such as SE (Squared Exponential) kernel. The influence of different loss function choice is also discussed.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.07994v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.07994v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"alpaca-vs-gp-based-prior-learning-a","repo_url":"https://github.com/yilun-wu/MetaL-Benchmark","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"few-shot-learning","task_name":"Few-Shot Learning"},{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}