Frontiers in Neurorobotics (Apr 2024)

The meta-learning method for the ensemble model based on situational meta-task

  • Zhengchao Zhang,
  • Zhengchao Zhang,
  • Lianke Zhou,
  • Lianke Zhou,
  • Yuyang Wu,
  • Nianbin Wang,
  • Nianbin Wang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2024.1391247
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 18

Abstract

Read online

IntroductionThe meta-learning methods have been widely used to solve the problem of few-shot learning. Generally, meta-learners are trained on a variety of tasks and then generalized to novel tasks.MethodsHowever, existing meta-learning methods do not consider the relationship between meta-tasks and novel tasks during the meta-training period, so that initial models of the meta-learner provide less useful meta-knowledge for the novel tasks. This leads to a weak generalization ability on novel tasks. Meanwhile, different initial models contain different meta-knowledge, which leads to certain differences in the learning effect of novel tasks during the meta-testing period. Therefore, this article puts forward a meta-optimization method based on situational meta-task construction and cooperation of multiple initial models. First, during the meta-training period, a method of constructing situational meta-task is proposed, and the selected candidate task sets provide more effective meta-knowledge for novel tasks. Then, during the meta-testing period, an ensemble model method based on meta-optimization is proposed to minimize the loss of inter-model cooperation in prediction, so that multiple models cooperation can realize the learning of novel tasks.ResultsThe above-mentioned methods are applied to popular few-shot character datasets and image recognition datasets. Furthermore, the experiment results indicate that the proposed method achieves good effects in few-shot classification tasks.DiscussionIn future work, we will extend our methods to provide more generalized and useful meta-knowledge to the model during the meta-training period when the novel few-shot tasks are completely invisible.

Keywords