Combining Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning and Transfer Learning for Regression

Abstract

For cases in which a machine learning model needs to be adapted to a new task, various approaches have been developed, including model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) and transfer learning. In this paper, we investigate how the differences in the data distributions between the old tasks and the new target task impact performance in regression problems. By performing experiments, we discover that these differences greatly affect the relative performance of different adaptation methods. Based on this observation, we develop ensemble schemes combining multiple adaptation methods that can handle a wide range of data distribution differences between the old and new tasks, thus offering more stable performance for a wide range of tasks. For evaluation, we consider three regression problems of sinusoidal fitting, virtual reality motion prediction, and temperature forecasting. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed ensemble schemes achieve the best performance among the considered methods in most cases.