Adaptive Deep Kernel Learning

Deep kernel learning provides an elegant and principled framework for combining the structural properties of deep learning algorithms with the flexibility of kernel methods. By means of a deep neural network, it consists of learning a kernel operator which is combined with a differentiable kernel algorithm for inference. While previous work within this framework has mostly explored learning a single kernel for large datasets, we focus herein on learning a kernel family for a variety of tasks in few-shot regression settings. Compared to single deep kernel learning, our novel algorithm permits finding the appropriate kernel for each task during inference, rather than using the same for all tasks. As such, our algorithm performs more effectively with complex task distributions in few-shot learning, which we demonstrate by benchmarking against existing state-of-the-art algorithms using real-world, few-shot regression tasks related to drug discovery.