Papers › TADAM: Task dependent adaptive metric for improved few-shot learning

TADAM: Task dependent adaptive metric for improved few-shot learning

23 May 2018NeurIPS 2018 12arXiv:1805.10123archive 2025-07-28

Boris N. Oreshkin, Pau Rodriguez, Alexandre Lacoste

Few-shot learning has become essential for producing models that generalize from few examples. In this work, we identify that metric scaling and metric task conditioning are important to improve the performance of few-shot algorithms. Our analysis reveals that simple metric scaling completely changes the nature of few-shot algorithm parameter updates. Metric scaling provides improvements up to 14% in accuracy for certain metrics on the mini-Imagenet 5-way 5-shot classification task. We further propose a simple and effective way of conditioning a learner on the task sample set, resulting in learning a task-dependent metric space. Moreover, we propose and empirically test a practical end-to-end optimization procedure based on auxiliary task co-training to learn a task-dependent metric space. The resulting few-shot learning model based on the task-dependent scaled metric achieves state of the art on mini-Imagenet. We confirm these results on another few-shot dataset that we introduce in this paper based on CIFAR100. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ElementAI/TADAM.

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ElementAI/TADAM mentioned in papertfApache-2.0 report
keonlee9420/Daft-Exprt mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
yaoyao-liu/mini-imagenet-tools mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report

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find_variables ElementAI/TADAM/common/gen_experiments.py named in the paper unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · cbbf64827d3199c5 · report
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Tasks

Few-Shot Image ClassificationFew-Shot Learning

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

FC100

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Few-Shot Image Classification FC100 5-way (1-shot) TADAM Accuracy 40.1 #22 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification FC100 5-way (5-shot) TADAM Accuracy 56.1 #22 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (1-shot) TADAM Accuracy 58.5 #78 of 105 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (10-shot) TADAM Accuracy 80.8 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Image Classification Mini-Imagenet 5-way (5-shot) TADAM Accuracy 76.7 #65 of 95 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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