{"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/variational-metric-scaling-for-metric-based","title":"Variational Metric Scaling for Metric-Based Meta-Learning","arxiv_id":"1912.11809","date":"2019-12-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jiaxin Chen","Li-Ming Zhan","Xiao-Ming Wu","Fu-Lai Chung"],"abstract":"Metric-based meta-learning has attracted a lot of attention due to its effectiveness and efficiency in few-shot learning. Recent studies show that metric scaling plays a crucial role in the performance of metric-based meta-learning algorithms. However, there still lacks a principled method for learning the metric scaling parameter automatically. In this paper, we recast metric-based meta-learning from a Bayesian perspective and develop a variational metric scaling framework for learning a proper metric scaling parameter. Firstly, we propose a stochastic variational method to learn a single global scaling parameter. To better fit the embedding space to a given data distribution, we extend our method to learn a dimensional scaling vector to transform the embedding space. Furthermore, to learn task-specific embeddings, we generate task-dependent dimensional scaling vectors with amortized variational inference. Our method is end-to-end without any pre-training and can be used as a simple plug-and-play module for existing metric-based meta-algorithms. Experiments on mini-ImageNet show that our methods can be used to consistently improve the performance of existing metric-based meta-algorithms including prototypical networks and TADAM. The source code can be downloaded from https://github.com/jiaxinchen666/variational-scaling.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11809v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11809v2.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":"variational-metric-scaling-for-metric-based","repo_url":"https://github.com/jiaxinchen666/variational-scaling","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":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"},{"task_slug":"variational-inference","task_name":"Variational Inference"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/1912.11809","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1912.11809","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}