Papers › On sensitivity of meta-learning to support data

On sensitivity of meta-learning to support data

26 Oct 2021NeurIPS 2021 12arXiv:2110.13953archive 2025-07-28

Mayank Agarwal, Mikhail Yurochkin, Yuekai Sun

Meta-learning algorithms are widely used for few-shot learning. For example, image recognition systems that readily adapt to unseen classes after seeing only a few labeled examples. Despite their success, we show that modern meta-learning algorithms are extremely sensitive to the data used for adaptation, i.e. support data. In particular, we demonstrate the existence of (unaltered, in-distribution, natural) images that, when used for adaptation, yield accuracy as low as 4\% or as high as 95\% on standard few-shot image classification benchmarks. We explain our empirical findings in terms of class margins, which in turn suggests that robust and safe meta-learning requires larger margins than supervised learning.

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Few-Shot Image ClassificationFew-Shot LearningImage ClassificationMeta-LearningSensitivityimage-classification

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