Poster
Online Meta-Learning
Chelsea Finn · Aravind Rajeswaran · Sham Kakade · Sergey Levine

Tue Jun 11th 06:30 -- 09:00 PM @ Pacific Ballroom #5
in Posters Tue »

A central capability of intelligent systems is the ability to continuously build upon previous experiences to speed up and enhance learning of new tasks. Two distinct research paradigms have studied this question. Meta-learning views this problem as learning a prior over model parameters that is amenable for fast adaptation on a new task, but typically assumes the tasks are available together as a batch. In contrast, online (regret based) learning considers a setting where tasks are revealed one after the other, but conventionally trains a single model without task-specific adaptation. This work introduces an online meta-learning setting, which merges ideas from both paradigms to better capture the spirit and practice of continual lifelong learning. We propose the follow the meta leader (FTML) algorithm which extends the MAML algorithm to this setting. Theoretically, this work provides an O(log T) regret guarantee with one additional higher order smoothness assumption (in comparison to the standard online setting). Our experimental evaluation on three different large-scale problems suggest that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms alternatives based on traditional online learning approaches.

Keywords: Algorithms · Online Learning · Transfer and Multitask Learning

Author Information

Chelsea Finn (Stanford, Google, UC Berkeley)
Chelsea Finn

Chelsea Finn is a research scientist at Google Brain and a post-doctoral scholar at UC Berkeley. In September 2019, she will be joining Stanford's computer science department as an assistant professor. Finn's research interests lie in the ability to enable robots and other agents to develop broadly intelligent behavior through learning and interaction. To this end, Finn has developed deep learning algorithms for concurrently learning visual perception and control in robotic manipulation skills, inverse reinforcement methods for scalable acquisition of nonlinear reward functions, and meta-learning algorithms that can enable fast, few-shot adaptation in both visual perception and deep reinforcement learning. Finn received her Bachelors degree in EECS at MIT, and her PhD in CS at UC Berkeley. Her research has been recognized through an NSF graduate fellowship, a Facebook fellowship, the C.V. Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award, and the MIT Technology Review 35 under 35 Award, and her work has been covered by various media outlets, including the New York Times, Wired, and Bloomberg.

Aravind Rajeswaran (University of Washington)
Sham Kakade (University of Washington)
Sergey Levine (UC Berkeley)
Sergey Levine

Sergey Levine received a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2009, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2014. He joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley in fall 2016. His work focuses on machine learning for decision making and control, with an emphasis on deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms. Applications of his work include autonomous robots and vehicles, as well as computer vision and graphics. His research includes developing algorithms for end-to-end training of deep neural network policies that combine perception and control, scalable algorithms for inverse reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning algorithms, and more.

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