HetMAML: Task-Heterogeneous Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Learning Across Modalities

Existing gradient-based meta-learning approaches to few-shot learning assume that all tasks have the same input feature space. However, in the real world scenarios, there are many cases that the input structures of tasks can be different, that is, different tasks may vary in the number of input modalities or data types. Existing meta-learners cannot handle the heterogeneous task distribution (HTD) as there is not only global meta-knowledge shared across tasks but also type-specific knowledge that distinguishes each type of tasks. To deal with task heterogeneity and promote fast within-task adaptions for each type of tasks, in this paper, we propose HetMAML, a task-heterogeneous model-agnostic meta-learning framework, which can capture both the type-specific and globally shared knowledge and can achieve the balance between knowledge customization and generalization. Specifically, we design a multi-channel backbone module that encodes the input of each type of tasks into the same length sequence of modality-specific embeddings. Then, we propose a task-aware iterative feature aggregation network which can automatically take into account the context of task-specific input structures and adaptively project the heterogeneous input spaces to the same lower-dimensional embedding space of concepts. Our experiments on six task-heterogeneous datasets demonstrate that HetMAML successfully leverages type-specific and globally shared meta-parameters for heterogeneous tasks and achieves fast within-task adaptions for each type of tasks.