{"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/model-agnostic-multitask-fine-tuning-for-few","title":"Rethinking Task Sampling for Few-shot Vision-Language Transfer Learning","arxiv_id":"2203.04904","date":"2022-03-09","proceeding":"MMMPIE (COLING) 2022 10","authors":["Zhenhailong Wang","Hang Yu","Manling Li","Han Zhao","Heng Ji"],"abstract":"Despite achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, existing vision-language models still fall short of few-shot transfer ability on domain-specific problems. Classical fine-tuning often fails to prevent highly expressive models from exploiting spurious correlations. Although model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) presents as a natural alternative for few-shot transfer learning, the expensive computation due to implicit second-order optimization limits its use on large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP. While much literature has been devoted to exploring alternative optimization strategies, we identify another essential aspect towards effective few-shot transfer learning, task sampling, which is previously only be viewed as part of data pre-processing in MAML. To show the impact of task sampling, we propose a simple algorithm, Model-Agnostic Multitask Fine-tuning (MAMF), which differentiates classical fine-tuning only on uniformly sampling multiple tasks. Despite its simplicity, we show that MAMF consistently outperforms classical fine-tuning on five few-shot vision-language classification tasks. We further show that the effectiveness of the bi-level optimization in MAML is highly sensitive to the zero-shot performance of a task in the context of few-shot vision-language classification. The goal of this paper is to provide new insights on what makes few-shot learning work, and encourage more research into investigating better task sampling strategies.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04904v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.04904v3.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":"model-agnostic-multitask-fine-tuning-for-few","repo_url":"https://github.com/mikewangwzhl/multitask-finetuning_clip","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"few-shot-learning","task_name":"Few-Shot Learning"},{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"clip","method_name":"CLIP"},{"method_slug":"maml","method_name":"MAML"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}