Papers › Bayesian Meta-Learning for the Few-Shot Setting via Deep Kernels

Bayesian Meta-Learning for the Few-Shot Setting via Deep Kernels

11 Oct 2019NeurIPS 2020 12arXiv:1910.05199archive 2025-07-28

Massimiliano Patacchiola, Jack Turner, Elliot J. Crowley, Michael O'Boyle, Amos Storkey

Recently, different machine learning methods have been introduced to tackle the challenging few-shot learning scenario that is, learning from a small labeled dataset related to a specific task. Common approaches have taken the form of meta-learning: learning to learn on the new problem given the old. Following the recognition that meta-learning is implementing learning in a multi-level model, we present a Bayesian treatment for the meta-learning inner loop through the use of deep kernels. As a result we can learn a kernel that transfers to new tasks; we call this Deep Kernel Transfer (DKT). This approach has many advantages: is straightforward to implement as a single optimizer, provides uncertainty quantification, and does not require estimation of task-specific parameters. We empirically demonstrate that DKT outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms in few-shot classification, and is the state of the art for cross-domain adaptation and regression. We conclude that complex meta-learning routines can be replaced by a simpler Bayesian model without loss of accuracy.

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Tasks

Bayesian InferenceDomain AdaptationFew-Shot Image ClassificationFew-Shot LearningGaussian ProcessesMeta-LearningUncertainty Quantification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Few-Shot Image Classification CUB 200 5-way 1-shot DKT + BNCosSim Accuracy 72.27 #27 of 36 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification CUB 200 5-way 5-shot DKT + BNCosSim Accuracy 85.64 #24 of 32 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-ImageNet-CUB 5-way (1-shot) DKT + CosSim Accuracy 40.22 #8 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-ImageNet-CUB 5-way (5-shot) DKT + BNCosSim Accuracy 56.40 #8 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (1-shot) DKT + BNCosSim Accuracy 62.96 #64 of 105 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (5-shot) DKT + BNCosSim Accuracy 64.0 #92 of 95 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification OMNIGLOT-EMNIST 5-way (1-shot) DKT + BNCosSim Accuracy 75.40 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification OMNIGLOT-EMNIST 5-way (5-shot) DKT + BNCosSim Accuracy 90.3 #2 of 2 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.

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