{"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/are-lstms-good-few-shot-learners","title":"Are LSTMs Good Few-Shot Learners?","arxiv_id":"2310.14139","date":"2023-10-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mike Huisman","Thomas M. Moerland","Aske Plaat","Jan N. van Rijn"],"abstract":"Deep learning requires large amounts of data to learn new tasks well, limiting its applicability to domains where such data is available. Meta-learning overcomes this limitation by learning how to learn. In 2001, Hochreiter et al. showed that an LSTM trained with backpropagation across different tasks is capable of meta-learning. Despite promising results of this approach on small problems, and more recently, also on reinforcement learning problems, the approach has received little attention in the supervised few-shot learning setting. We revisit this approach and test it on modern few-shot learning benchmarks. We find that LSTM, surprisingly, outperform the popular meta-learning technique MAML on a simple few-shot sine wave regression benchmark, but that LSTM, expectedly, fall short on more complex few-shot image classification benchmarks. We identify two potential causes and propose a new method called Outer Product LSTM (OP-LSTM) that resolves these issues and displays substantial performance gains over the plain LSTM. Compared to popular meta-learning baselines, OP-LSTM yields competitive performance on within-domain few-shot image classification, and performs better in cross-domain settings by 0.5% to 1.9% in accuracy score. While these results alone do not set a new state-of-the-art, the advances of OP-LSTM are orthogonal to other advances in the field of meta-learning, yield new insights in how LSTM work in image classification, allowing for a whole range of new research directions. For reproducibility purposes, we publish all our research code publicly.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.14139v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.14139v1.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":"are-lstms-good-few-shot-learners","repo_url":"https://github.com/mikehuisman/lstm-fewshotlearning-oplstm","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"few-shot-image-classification","task_name":"Few-Shot Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"few-shot-learning","task_name":"Few-Shot Learning"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"lstm","method_name":"LSTM"},{"method_slug":"maml","method_name":"MAML"},{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"},{"method_slug":"sigmoid-activation","method_name":"Sigmoid Activation"},{"method_slug":"tanh-activation","method_name":"Tanh Activation"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}