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Main Authors: Sow, Daouda, Lin, Sen, Liang, Yingbin, Zhang, Junshan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.00857
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author Sow, Daouda
Lin, Sen
Liang, Yingbin
Zhang, Junshan
author_facet Sow, Daouda
Lin, Sen
Liang, Yingbin
Zhang, Junshan
contents Online meta-learning has recently emerged as a marriage between batch meta-learning and online learning, for achieving the capability of quick adaptation on new tasks in a lifelong manner. However, most existing approaches focus on the restrictive setting where the distribution of the online tasks remains fixed with known task boundaries. In this work, we relax these assumptions and propose a novel algorithm for task-agnostic online meta-learning in non-stationary environments. More specifically, we first propose two simple but effective detection mechanisms of task switches and distribution shift based on empirical observations, which serve as a key building block for more elegant online model updates in our algorithm: the task switch detection mechanism allows reusing of the best model available for the current task at hand, and the distribution shift detection mechanism differentiates the meta model update in order to preserve the knowledge for in-distribution tasks and quickly learn the new knowledge for out-of-distribution tasks. In particular, our online meta model updates are based only on the current data, which eliminates the need of storing previous data as required in most existing methods. We further show that a sublinear task-averaged regret can be achieved for our algorithm under mild conditions. Empirical studies on three different benchmarks clearly demonstrate the significant advantage of our algorithm over related baseline approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_00857
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Algorithm Design for Online Meta-Learning with Task Boundary Detection
Sow, Daouda
Lin, Sen
Liang, Yingbin
Zhang, Junshan
Machine Learning
Online meta-learning has recently emerged as a marriage between batch meta-learning and online learning, for achieving the capability of quick adaptation on new tasks in a lifelong manner. However, most existing approaches focus on the restrictive setting where the distribution of the online tasks remains fixed with known task boundaries. In this work, we relax these assumptions and propose a novel algorithm for task-agnostic online meta-learning in non-stationary environments. More specifically, we first propose two simple but effective detection mechanisms of task switches and distribution shift based on empirical observations, which serve as a key building block for more elegant online model updates in our algorithm: the task switch detection mechanism allows reusing of the best model available for the current task at hand, and the distribution shift detection mechanism differentiates the meta model update in order to preserve the knowledge for in-distribution tasks and quickly learn the new knowledge for out-of-distribution tasks. In particular, our online meta model updates are based only on the current data, which eliminates the need of storing previous data as required in most existing methods. We further show that a sublinear task-averaged regret can be achieved for our algorithm under mild conditions. Empirical studies on three different benchmarks clearly demonstrate the significant advantage of our algorithm over related baseline approaches.
title Algorithm Design for Online Meta-Learning with Task Boundary Detection
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.00857