# Robust MAML: Prioritization task buffer with adaptive learning process for model-agnostic meta-learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.08233 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08233/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Trust Region Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05477/) (2015)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [On First-Order Meta-Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02999/) (2018)
- [Neural Turing Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.5401/) (2014)
- [RL2: Fast Reinforcement Learning via Slow Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02779/) (2016)
- [Efficient Off-Policy Meta-Reinforcement Learning via Probabilistic Context Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08254/) (2019)
- [Gradient-based Hyperparameter Optimization through Reversible Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03492/) (2015)
- [How to train your MAML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09502/) (2018)
- [Meta Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00837/) (2017)
- [Probabilistic Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02817/) (2018)
- [Distributed Distributional Deterministic Policy Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08617/) (2018)
- [Online Learning Rate Adaptation with Hypergradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04782/) (2017)
- [Curriculum in Gradient-Based Meta-Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07956/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [One-Step Flow Q-Learning: Addressing the Diffusion Policy Bottleneck in Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13904/) (2025)
- [Meta-learning in healthcare: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02877/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Policy: Enhancing Offline Reinforcement Learning with Adversarial Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11206/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Rank-One MIMO Q Network Framework for Accelerated Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19917/) (2026)
- [Fast and Highly Expressive Policy Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning via Bootstrapped Flow Q-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10613/) (2026)
- [GDCA: GAN-based single image super resolution with Dual discriminators and Channel Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05014/) (2021)
- [Meta-Learning and Meta-Reinforcement Learning -- Tracing the Path towards DeepMind's Adaptive Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19837/) (2026)
- [Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18132/) (2026)
- [Compositional Average Velocity Modeling for Efficient Diffusion Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14941/) (2026)
- [Metric-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Object Hallucination Reduction in LVLM-Based Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14976/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Model agnostic meta-learning (MAML) is a popular state-of-the-art meta-learning algorithm that provides good weight initialization of a model given a variety of learning tasks. The model initialized by provided weight can be fine-tuned to an unseen task despite only using a small amount of samples and within a few adaptation steps. MAML is simple and versatile but requires costly learning rate tuning and careful design of the task distribution which affects its scalability and generalization. This paper proposes a more robust MAML based on an adaptive learning scheme and a prioritization task buffer(PTB) referred to as Robust MAML (RMAML) for improving scalability of training process and alleviating the problem of distribution mismatch. RMAML uses gradient-based hyper-parameter optimization to automatically find the optimal learning rate and uses the PTB to gradually adjust train-ing task distribution toward testing task distribution over the course of training. Experimental results on meta reinforcement learning environments demonstrate a substantial performance gain as well as being less sensitive to hyper-parameter choice and robust to distribution mismatch.
