{"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/does-maml-only-work-via-feature-re-use-a-data","title":"Does MAML Only Work via Feature Re-use? A Data Centric Perspective","arxiv_id":"2112.13137","date":"2021-12-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Brando Miranda","Yu-Xiong Wang","Sanmi Koyejo"],"abstract":"Recent work has suggested that a good embedding is all we need to solve many few-shot learning benchmarks. Furthermore, other work has strongly suggested that Model Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) also works via this same method - by learning a good embedding. These observations highlight our lack of understanding of what meta-learning algorithms are doing and when they work. In this work, we provide empirical results that shed some light on how meta-learned MAML representations function. In particular, we identify three interesting properties: 1) In contrast to previous work, we show that it is possible to define a family of synthetic benchmarks that result in a low degree of feature re-use - suggesting that current few-shot learning benchmarks might not have the properties needed for the success of meta-learning algorithms; 2) meta-overfitting occurs when the number of classes (or concepts) are finite, and this issue disappears once the task has an unbounded number of concepts (e.g., online learning); 3) more adaptation at meta-test time with MAML does not necessarily result in a significant representation change or even an improvement in meta-test performance - even when training on our proposed synthetic benchmarks. Finally, we suggest that to understand meta-learning algorithms better, we must go beyond tracking only absolute performance and, in addition, formally quantify the degree of meta-learning and track both metrics together. Reporting results in future work this way will help us identify the sources of meta-overfitting more accurately and help us design more flexible meta-learning algorithms that learn beyond fixed feature re-use. Finally, we conjecture the core challenge of re-thinking meta-learning is in the design of few-shot learning data sets and benchmarks - rather than in the algorithms, as suggested by previous work.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.13137v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.13137v1.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":"does-maml-only-work-via-feature-re-use-a-data","repo_url":"https://github.com/brando90/Does-MAML-Only-Work-via-Feature-Re-use-A-Data-Set-Centric-Perspective","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"few-shot-learning","task_name":"Few-Shot Learning"},{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"maml","method_name":"MAML"}],"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}