Universal Algorithm-Implicit Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Woerner, Stefano, Oh, Seong Joon, Baumgartner, Christian F.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Woerner, Stefano
Oh, Seong Joon
Baumgartner, Christian F.
author_facet Woerner, Stefano
Oh, Seong Joon
Baumgartner, Christian F.
contents Current meta-learning methods are constrained to narrow task distributions with fixed feature and label spaces, limiting applicability. Moreover, the current meta-learning literature uses key terms like "universal" and "general-purpose" inconsistently and lacks precise definitions, hindering comparability. We introduce a theoretical framework for meta-learning which formally defines practical universality and introduces a distinction between algorithm-explicit and algorithm-implicit learning, providing a principled vocabulary for reasoning about universal meta-learning methods. Guided by this framework, we present TAIL, a transformer-based algorithm-implicit meta-learner that functions across tasks with varying domains, modalities, and label configurations. TAIL features three innovations over prior transformer-based meta-learners: random projections for cross-modal feature encoding, random injection label embeddings that extrapolate to larger label spaces, and efficient inline query processing. TAIL achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard few-shot benchmarks while generalizing to unseen domains. Unlike other meta-learning methods, it also generalizes to unseen modalities, solving text classification tasks despite training exclusively on images, handles tasks with up to 20$\times$ more classes than seen during training, and provides orders-of-magnitude computational savings over prior transformer-based approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_14761
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Universal Algorithm-Implicit Learning
Woerner, Stefano
Oh, Seong Joon
Baumgartner, Christian F.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Current meta-learning methods are constrained to narrow task distributions with fixed feature and label spaces, limiting applicability. Moreover, the current meta-learning literature uses key terms like "universal" and "general-purpose" inconsistently and lacks precise definitions, hindering comparability. We introduce a theoretical framework for meta-learning which formally defines practical universality and introduces a distinction between algorithm-explicit and algorithm-implicit learning, providing a principled vocabulary for reasoning about universal meta-learning methods. Guided by this framework, we present TAIL, a transformer-based algorithm-implicit meta-learner that functions across tasks with varying domains, modalities, and label configurations. TAIL features three innovations over prior transformer-based meta-learners: random projections for cross-modal feature encoding, random injection label embeddings that extrapolate to larger label spaces, and efficient inline query processing. TAIL achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard few-shot benchmarks while generalizing to unseen domains. Unlike other meta-learning methods, it also generalizes to unseen modalities, solving text classification tasks despite training exclusively on images, handles tasks with up to 20$\times$ more classes than seen during training, and provides orders-of-magnitude computational savings over prior transformer-based approaches.
title Universal Algorithm-Implicit Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14761