# A Nested Bi-level Optimization Framework for Robust Few Shot Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.06782 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06782/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [BLO-SAM: Bi-level Optimization Based Overfitting-Preventing Finetuning of SAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16338/) (2024)
- [Towards Few-Shot Learning in the Open World: A Review and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09722/) (2024)
- [DAC-MR: Data Augmentation Consistency Based Meta-Regularization for Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07892/) (2023)
- [PLATINUM: Semi-Supervised Model Agnostic Meta-Learning using Submodular Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12928/) (2022)
- [SHaSaM: Submodular Hard Sample Mining for Fair Facial Attribute Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05162/) (2026)
- [SMA: Submodular Modality Aligner For Data Efficient Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12872/) (2026)
- [BatMan-CLR: Making Few-shots Meta-Learners Resilient Against Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06046/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML), a popular gradient-based meta-learning framework, assumes that the contribution of each task or instance to the meta-learner is equal. Hence, it fails to address the domain shift between base and novel classes in few-shot learning. In this work, we propose a novel robust meta-learning algorithm, NestedMAML, which learns to assign weights to training tasks or instances. We consider weights as hyper-parameters and iteratively optimize them using a small set of validation tasks set in a nested bi-level optimization approach (in contrast to the standard bi-level optimization in MAML). We then apply NestedMAML in the meta-training stage, which involves (1) several tasks sampled from a distribution different from the meta-test task distribution, or (2) some data samples with noisy labels. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that NestedMAML efficiently mitigates the effects of "unwanted" tasks or instances, leading to significant improvement over the state-of-the-art robust meta-learning methods.