Neural networks can learn to extract statistical properties from data, but they seldom make use of structured information from the label space to help representation learning. Although some label structure can implicitly be obtained when training on huge amounts of data, in a few-shot learning context where little data is available, making explicit use of the label structure can inform the model to reshape the representation space to reflect a global sense of class dependencies.   We propose a meta-learning framework, Conditional class-Aware Meta-Learning (CAML), that conditionally transforms feature representations based on a metric space that is trained to capture inter-class dependencies. This enables a conditional modulation of the feature representations of the base-learner to impose regularities informed by the label space. Experiments show that the conditional transformation in CAML leads to more disentangled representations and achieves competitive results on the miniImageNet benchmark. In machine learning, the objective of classification is to train a model to categorize inputs into various classes. We usually assume a categorical distribution over the label space, and thus effectively ignore dependencies among them. However, class structure does exist in real world and is also present in most datasets. Although class structure can be implicitly obtained as a by-product during learning, it is not commonly exploited in an explicit manner to develop better learning systems. The use of label structure might not be of prime importance when having access to huge amounts of data, such the full ImageNet dataset. However, in the case of few-shot learning where little data is available, meta-information such as dependencies in the label space can be crucial.In recent years, few-shot learning-learning from few examples across many tasks-has received considerable attention BID23 BID28 BID6 BID30 . In particular, the concept of meta-learning has been shown to provide effective tools for few-shot learning tasks. In contrast to common transfer learning methods that aim to fine-tune a pre-trained model, meta-learning systems are trained by being exposed to a large number of tasks and evaluated in their ability to learn new tasks effectively. In meta-training, learning happens at two levels: a meta-learner that learns across many tasks, and a base-learner that optimizes for each task. Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is a gradient-based meta-learning algorithm that provides a mechanism for rapid adaptation by optimizing only for the initial parameters of the base-learner BID6 .Our motivation stems from a core challenge in gradient-based meta-learning, wherein the quality of gradient information is key to fast generalization: it is known that gradient-based optimization fails to converge adequately when trained from only a few examples BID23 , hampering the effectiveness of gradient-based meta-learning techniques. We hypothesize that under such circumstances, introducing a metric space trained to encode regularities of the label structure can impose global class dependencies on the model. This class structure can then provide a high-level view of the input examples, in turn leading to learning more disentangled representations.We propose a meta-learning framework taking advantage of this class structure information, which is available in a number of applications. The Conditional class-Aware Meta-Learning (CAML) model is tasked with producing activations in a manner similar to a standard neural network, but with the additional flexibility to shift and scale those activations conditioned on some auxiliary meta-information. While there are no restrictions on the nature of the conditioning factor, in this work we model class dependencies by means of a metric space. We aim to learn a function mapping inputs to a metric space where semantic distances between instances follow an Euclidean geometry-classes that are semantically close lie in close proximity in an p sense. The goal of the conditional class-aware transformation is to make explicit use of the label structure to inform the model to reshape the representation landscape in a manner that incorporates a global sense of class structure.The contributions of this work are threefold: (i) We provide a meta-learning framework that makes use of structured class information in the form of a metric space to modulate representations in few-shot learning tasks; (ii) We introduce class-aware grouping to improve the statistical strength of few-shot learning tasks; (iii) We show experimentally that our proposed algorithm learns more disentangled representation and achieves competitive results on the miniImageNet benchmark. In this work, we propose Conditional class-Aware Meta-Learning (CAML) that incorporates class information by means of an embedding space to conditionally modulate representations of the base-learner. By conditionally transforming the intermediate representations of the base-learner, our goal is to reshape the representation with a global sense of class structure. Experiments reveal that the proposed conditional transformation can modulate the convolutional feature maps towards a more disentangled representation. We also introduce class-aware grouping to address a lack of statistical strength in few-shot learning. The proposed approach obtains competitive results with the current state-of-the-art performance on 5-way 1-shot and 5-shot miniImageNet benchmark. TAB1 suggest that, while 1-shot learning is sensitive to multitask learning and class-aware grouping, 5-shot learning is less sensitive those techniques. This is owing to a lack of sufficient training examples in 1-shot learning tasks, which requires more explicit guidance in the training procedure. We further note that, in 1-shot learning, using class-aware grouping alone can improve CBN's performance by 3%. This means exploiting metric-based channel mean and variance can provide valuable information for gradient-based meta-learning.
CAML is an instance of MAML with conditional class dependencies.
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