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Accelerating Neural Self-Improvement via Bootstrapping (arxiv.org)
3 points by ftxbro on May 3, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A few-shot learner is trained to match its own accuracy when shown many examples, while seeing only a handful, so it learns faster from scarce labels. On standard image-classification tests this beat the usual training setup that only aims for the best few-example accuracy.

Abstract

Few-shot learning with sequence-processing neural networks (NNs) has recently attracted a new wave of attention in the context of large language models. In the standard N-way K-shot learning setting, an NN is explicitly optimised to learn to classify unlabelled inputs by observing a sequence of NK labelled examples. This pressures the NN to learn a learning algorithm that achieves optimal performance, given the limited number of training examples. Here we study an auxiliary loss that encourages further acceleration of few-shot learning, by applying recently proposed bootstrapped meta-learning to NN few-shot learners: we optimise the K-shot learner to match its own performance achievable by observing more than NK examples, using only NK examples. Promising results are obtained on the standard Mini-ImageNet dataset. Our code is public.

Kazuki Irie, Jürgen Schmidhuber
arXiv:2305.01547 · cs.LG · submitted May 2, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · Presented at ICLR 2023 Workshop on Mathematical and Empirical Understanding of Foundation Models, https://openreview.net/forum?id=SDwUYcyOCyP

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