# Sharing to learn and learning to share; Fitting together Meta-Learning, Multi-Task Learning, and Transfer Learning: A meta review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.12146 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12146/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 74 of its 208 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 74)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [MoleculeNet: A Benchmark for Molecular Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00564/) (2017)
- [On First-Order Meta-Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02999/) (2018)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05098/) (2017)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08328/) (2018)
- [TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05002/) (2020)
- [TADAM: Task dependent adaptive metric for improved few-shot learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10123/) (2018)
- [Meta-SGD: Learning to Learn Quickly for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09835/) (2017)
- [Multi-Task Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09796/) (2020)
- [Rapid Learning or Feature Reuse? Towards Understanding the Effectiveness of MAML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09157/) (2019)
- [Meta-Dataset: A Dataset of Datasets for Learning to Learn from Few Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03096/) (2019)
- [Deep Multi-modal Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Datasets, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07830/) (2019)
- [Meta-Transfer Learning for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02391/) (2018)
- [A Brief Review of Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03978/) (2020)
- [Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10643/) (2020)
- [DIODE: A Dense Indoor and Outdoor DEpth Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00463/) (2019)
- [PAD-Net: Multi-Tasks Guided Prediction-and-Distillation Network for Simultaneous Depth Estimation and Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04409/) (2018)
- [VariBAD: A Very Good Method for Bayes-Adaptive Deep RL via Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08348/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Dynamics Generalisation in Reinforcement Learning via Adaptive Context-Aware Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16686/) (2023)
- [Less is More -- Towards parsimonious multi-task models using structured sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12114/) (2023)
- [Challenges and Opportunities of Using Transformer-Based Multi-Task Learning in NLP Through ML Lifecycle: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08234/) (2023)
- [HiBerNAC: Hierarchical Brain-inspired Robotic Neural Agent Collective for Disentangling Complex Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08296/) (2025)
- [From Few-Label to Zero-Label: An Approach for Cross-System Log-Based Anomaly Detection with Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19806/) (2025)
- [Meta-Sparsity: Learning Optimal Sparse Structures in Multi-task Networks through Meta-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12115/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Integrating knowledge across different domains is an essential feature of human learning. Learning paradigms such as transfer learning, meta-learning, and multi-task learning reflect the human learning process by exploiting the prior knowledge for new tasks, encouraging faster learning and good generalization for new tasks. This article gives a detailed view of these learning paradigms and their comparative analysis. The weakness of one learning algorithm turns out to be a strength of another, and thus, merging them is a prevalent trait in the literature. Numerous research papers focus on each of these learning paradigms separately and provide a comprehensive overview of them. However, this article reviews research studies that combine (two of) these learning algorithms. This survey describes how these techniques are combined to solve problems in many different fields of research, including computer vision, natural language processing, hyper-spectral imaging, and many more, in a supervised setting only. Based on the knowledge accumulated from the literature, we hypothesize a generic task-agnostic and model-agnostic learning network - an ensemble of meta-learning, transfer learning, and multi-task learning, termed Multi-modal Multi-task Meta Transfer Learning. We also present some open research questions, limitations, and future research directions for this proposed network. The aim of this article is to spark interest among scholars in effectively merging existing learning algorithms with the intention of advancing research in this field. Instead of presenting experimental results, we invite readers to explore and contemplate techniques for merging algorithms while navigating through their limitations.