{"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/improving-generalization-in-meta-learning-via","title":"Improving Generalization in Meta-Learning via Meta-Gradient Augmentation","arxiv_id":"2306.08460","date":"2023-06-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ren Wang","Haoliang Sun","Qi Wei","Xiushan Nie","Yuling Ma","Yilong Yin"],"abstract":"Meta-learning methods typically follow a two-loop framework, where each loop potentially suffers from notorious overfitting, hindering rapid adaptation and generalization to new tasks. Existing schemes solve it by enhancing the mutual-exclusivity or diversity of training samples, but these data manipulation strategies are data-dependent and insufficiently flexible. This work alleviates overfitting in meta-learning from the perspective of gradient regularization and proposes a data-independent \\textbf{M}eta-\\textbf{G}radient \\textbf{Aug}mentation (\\textbf{MGAug}) method. The key idea is to first break the rote memories by network pruning to address memorization overfitting in the inner loop, and then the gradients of pruned sub-networks naturally form the high-quality augmentation of the meta-gradient to alleviate learner overfitting in the outer loop. Specifically, we explore three pruning strategies, including \\textit{random width pruning}, \\textit{random parameter pruning}, and a newly proposed \\textit{catfish pruning} that measures a Meta-Memorization Carrying Amount (MMCA) score for each parameter and prunes high-score ones to break rote memories as much as possible. The proposed MGAug is theoretically guaranteed by the generalization bound from the PAC-Bayes framework. In addition, we extend a lightweight version, called MGAug-MaxUp, as a trade-off between performance gains and resource overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple few-shot learning benchmarks validate MGAug's effectiveness and significant improvement over various meta-baselines. The code is publicly available at \\url{https://github.com/xxLifeLover/Meta-Gradient-Augmentation}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08460v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.08460v1.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":"improving-generalization-in-meta-learning-via","repo_url":"https://github.com/xxlifelover/meta-gradient-augmentation","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"few-shot-learning","task_name":"Few-Shot Learning"},{"task_slug":"memorization","task_name":"Memorization"},{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"},{"task_slug":"network-pruning","task_name":"Network Pruning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"pruning","method_name":"Pruning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}