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Oral
Provable Guarantees for Gradient-Based Meta-Learning
Nina Balcan · Mikhail Khodak · Ameet Talwalkar

Wed Jun 02:30 PM -- 02:35 PM PDT @ Room 201
in Transfer and Multitask Learning »

We study the problem of meta-learning through the lens of online convex optimization, developing a meta-algorithm bridging the gap between popular gradient-based meta-learning and classical regularization-based multi-task transfer methods. Our method is the first to simultaneously satisfy good sample efficiency guarantees in the convex setting, with generalization bounds that improve with task-similarity, while also being computationally scalable to modern deep learning architectures and the many-task setting. Despite its simplicity, the algorithm matches, up to a constant factor, a lower bound on the performance of any such parameter-transfer method under natural task similarity assumptions. We use experiments in both convex and deep learning settings to verify and demonstrate the applicability of our theory.

Author Information

Nina Balcan (Carnegie Mellon University)

Maria-Florina Balcan is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her main research interests are machine learning and theoretical computer science. Her honors include the CMU SCS Distinguished Dissertation Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a Microsoft Faculty Research Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and several paper awards. She has served as a Program Committee Co-chair for COLT 2014, a Program Committee Co-chair for ICML 2016, and a board member of the International Machine Learning Society.

Misha Khodak (CMU)
Ameet Talwalkar (Carnegie Mellon University)

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