Papers › Amortized Bayesian Meta-Learning

Amortized Bayesian Meta-Learning

1 May 2019ICLR 2019 5archive 2025-07-28

Sachin Ravi, Alex Beatson

Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, has proven to be a successful strategy in attacking problems in supervised learning and reinforcement learning that involve small amounts of data. State-of-the-art solutions involve learning an initialization and/or learning algorithm using a set of training episodes so that the meta learner can generalize to an evaluation episode quickly. These methods perform well but often lack good quantification of uncertainty, which can be vital to real-world applications when data is lacking. We propose a meta-learning method which efficiently amortizes hierarchical variational inference across tasks, learning a prior distribution over neural network weights so that a few steps of Bayes by Backprop will produce a good task-specific approximate posterior. We show that our method produces good uncertainty estimates on contextual bandit and few-shot learning benchmarks.

PaperPDFCode

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Few-Shot Image ClassificationFew-Shot LearningMeta-LearningReinforcement LearningVariational Inference

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (1-shot) ABML Accuracy 45.0 #105 of 105 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections