{"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/bayesian-meta-learning-through-variational","title":"Bayesian Meta-Learning Through Variational Gaussian Processes","arxiv_id":"2110.11044","date":"2021-10-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Vivek Myers","Nikhil Sardana"],"abstract":"Recent advances in the field of meta-learning have tackled domains consisting of large numbers of small (\"few-shot\") supervised learning tasks. Meta-learning algorithms must be able to rapidly adapt to any individual few-shot task, fitting to a small support set within a task and using it to predict the labels of the task's query set. This problem setting can be extended to the Bayesian context, wherein rather than predicting a single label for each query data point, a model predicts a distribution of labels capturing its uncertainty. Successful methods in this domain include Bayesian ensembling of MAML-based models, Bayesian neural networks, and Gaussian processes with learned deep kernel and mean functions. While Gaussian processes have a robust Bayesian interpretation in the meta-learning context, they do not naturally model non-Gaussian predictive posteriors for expressing uncertainty. In this paper, we design a theoretically principled method, VMGP, extending Gaussian-process-based meta-learning to allow for high-quality, arbitrary non-Gaussian uncertainty predictions. On benchmark environments with complex non-smooth or discontinuous structure, we find our VMGP method performs significantly better than existing Bayesian meta-learning baselines.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.11044v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.11044v1.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":"bayesian-meta-learning-through-variational","repo_url":"https://github.com/vivekmyers/vmgp","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"gaussian-processes","task_name":"Gaussian Processes"},{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}