# Gaussian Process Meta Few-shot Classifier Learning via Linear Discriminant Laplace Approximation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.05392 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05392/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [A Closer Look at Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04232/) (2019)
- [Generalizing from a Few Examples: A Survey on Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05046/) (2019)
- [Meta-Learning for Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00676/) (2018)
- [Deep Kernel Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02222/) (2015)
- [TADAM: Task dependent adaptive metric for improved few-shot learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10123/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Learning via Embedding Adaptation with Set-to-Set Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03664/) (2018)
- [SimpleShot: Revisiting Nearest-Neighbor Classification for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04623/) (2019)
- [Bayesian Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03836/) (2018)
- [Cross-Domain Few-Shot Classification via Learned Feature-Wise Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08735/) (2020)
- [Recasting Gradient-Based Meta-Learning as Hierarchical Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08930/) (2018)
- [Negative Margin Matters: Understanding Margin in Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12060/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Image Recognition by Predicting Parameters from Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03466/) (2017)
- [Meta-Learning Probabilistic Inference For Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09921/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Deep Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03522/) (2020)
- [Associative Alignment for Few-shot Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05094/) (2019)
- [Shallow Bayesian Meta Learning for Real-World Few-Shot Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02833/) (2021)
- [MetaFun: Meta-Learning with Iterative Functional Updates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02738/) (2019)
- [Learning to learn via Self-Critique](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10295/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [HyperShot: Few-Shot Learning by Kernel HyperNetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11378/) (2022)
- [Meta-learning Adaptive Deep Kernel Gaussian Processes for Molecular Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02708/) (2022)
- [HyperMAML: Few-Shot Adaptation of Deep Models with Hypernetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15745/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The meta learning few-shot classification is an emerging problem in machine learning that received enormous attention recently, where the goal is to learn a model that can quickly adapt to a new task with only a few labeled data. We consider the Bayesian Gaussian process (GP) approach, in which we meta-learn the GP prior, and the adaptation to a new task is carried out by the GP predictive model from the posterior inference. We adopt the Laplace posterior approximation, but to circumvent the iterative gradient steps for finding the MAP solution, we introduce a novel linear discriminant analysis (LDA) plugin as a surrogate for the MAP solution. In essence, the MAP solution is approximated by the LDA estimate, but to take the GP prior into account, we adopt the prior-norm adjustment to estimate LDA's shared variance parameters, which ensures that the adjusted estimate is consistent with the GP prior. This enables closed-form differentiable GP posteriors and predictive distributions, thus allowing fast meta training. We demonstrate considerable improvement over the previous approaches.