Optimization as a Model for Few-Shot Learning

Though deep neural networks have shown great success in the large data domain, they generally perform poorly on few-shot learning tasks, where a model has to quickly generalize after seeing very few examples from each class. The general belief is that gradient-based optimization in high capacity models requires many iterative steps over many examples to perform well. Here, we propose an LSTM-based meta-learner model to learn the exact optimization algorithm used to train another learner neural network in the few-shot regime. The parametrization of our model allows it to learn appropriate parameter updates specifically for the scenario where a set amount of updates will be made, while also learning a general…