A Representation Learning Perspective on the Importance of Train-Validation Splitting in Meta-Learning
Nikunj Saunshi, Arushi Gupta, Wei Hu
Abstract
An effective approach in meta-learning is to utilize multiple “train tasks” to learn a good initialization for model parameters that can help solve unseen “test tasks” with very few samples by fine-tuning from this initialization. Although successful in practice, theoretical understanding of such methods is limited. This work studies an important aspect of these methods: splitting the data from each task into train (support) and validation (query) sets during meta-training. Inspired by recent work (Raghu et al., 2020), we view such meta-learning methods through the lens of representation learning and argue that the train-validation split encourages the learned representation to be {\em low-rank} without compromising on expressivity, as opposed to the non-splitting variant that encourages high-rank representations. Since sample efficiency benefits from low-rankness, the splitting strategy will require very few samples to solve unseen test tasks. We present theoretical results that formalize this idea for linear representation learning on a subspace meta-learning instance, and experimentally verify this practical benefit of splitting in simulations and on standard meta-learning benchmarks.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v139-saunshi21a,
title = {A Representation Learning Perspective on the Importance of Train-Validation Splitting in Meta-Learning},
author = {Saunshi, Nikunj and Gupta, Arushi and Hu, Wei},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {9333--9343},
year = {2021},
editor = {Meila, Marina and Zhang, Tong},
volume = {139},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {18--24 Jul},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/saunshi21a/saunshi21a.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/saunshi21a.html},
abstract = {An effective approach in meta-learning is to utilize multiple “train tasks” to learn a good initialization for model parameters that can help solve unseen “test tasks” with very few samples by fine-tuning from this initialization. Although successful in practice, theoretical understanding of such methods is limited. This work studies an important aspect of these methods: splitting the data from each task into train (support) and validation (query) sets during meta-training. Inspired by recent work (Raghu et al., 2020), we view such meta-learning methods through the lens of representation learning and argue that the train-validation split encourages the learned representation to be {\em low-rank} without compromising on expressivity, as opposed to the non-splitting variant that encourages high-rank representations. Since sample efficiency benefits from low-rankness, the splitting strategy will require very few samples to solve unseen test tasks. We present theoretical results that formalize this idea for linear representation learning on a subspace meta-learning instance, and experimentally verify this practical benefit of splitting in simulations and on standard meta-learning benchmarks.}
}