Evo-MAML: Meta-Learning with Evolving Gradient

Abstract

How to rapidly adapt to new tasks and improve model generalization through few-shot learning remains a significant challenge in meta-learning. Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) has become a powerful approach, with offers a simple framework with excellent generality. However, the requirement to compute second-order derivatives and retain a lengthy calculation graph poses considerable computational and memory burdens, limiting the practicality of MAML. To address this issue, we propose Evolving MAML (Evo-MAML), an optimization-based meta-learning method that incorporates evolving gradient within the inner loop. Evo-MAML avoids the second-order information, resulting in reduced computational complexity. Experimental results show that Evo-MAML exhibits higher generality and competitive performance when compared to existing first-order approximation approaches, making it suitable for both few-shot learning and meta-reinforcement learning settings.