Decision-Theoretic Meta-Learning: Versatile and Efficient Amortization of Few-Shot Learning

This paper develops a general framework for data efficient and versatile deep learning. The new framework comprises three elements: 1) Discriminative probabilistic models from multi-task learning that leverage shared statistical information across tasks. 2) A novel Bayesian decision theoretic approach to meta-learning probabilistic inference across many tasks. 3) A fast, flexible, and simple to train amortization network that can automatically generalize and extrapolate to a wide range of settings. The VERSA algorithm, a particular instance of the framework, is evaluated on a suite of supervised few-shot learning tasks. VERSA achieves state-of-the-art performance in one-shot learning on Omniglot and miniImagenet, and produces compelling results on a one-shot ShapeNet view reconstruction challenge.