# Contrastive Meta-Learning for Partially Observable Few-Shot Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13136 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13136/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Meta-Learning with Latent Embedding Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05960/) (2018)
- [Deep Recurrent Q-Learning for Partially Observable MDPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.06527/) (2015)
- [Meta-SGD: Learning to Learn Quickly for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09835/) (2017)
- [Keystroke Dynamics as Part of Lifelogging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10144/) (2020)
- [Meta-Dataset: A Dataset of Datasets for Learning to Learn from Few Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03096/) (2019)
- [How to train your MAML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09502/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Representation Learning: Introduction, Advances and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09327/) (2021)
- [Towards a Neural Statistician](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02185/) (2016)
- [Meta-Learning Probabilistic Inference For Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09921/) (2018)
- [CLOOB: Modern Hopfield Networks with InfoLOOB Outperform CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11316/) (2021)
- [DeepEMD: Differentiable Earth Mover's Distance for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06777/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Generalization in Few-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07267/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Like Humans to Few-Shot Learning through Knowledge Permeation of Vision and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12543/) (2024)
- [Intelligently Augmented Contrastive Tensor Factorization: Empowering Multi-dimensional Time Series Classification in Low-Data Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03825/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many contrastive and meta-learning approaches learn representations by identifying common features in multiple views. However, the formalism for these approaches generally assumes features to be shared across views to be captured coherently. We consider the problem of learning a unified representation from partial observations, where useful features may be present in only some of the views. We approach this through a probabilistic formalism enabling views to map to representations with different levels of uncertainty in different components; these views can then be integrated with one another through marginalisation over that uncertainty. Our approach, Partial Observation Experts Modelling (POEM), then enables us to meta-learn consistent representations from partial observations. We evaluate our approach on an adaptation of a comprehensive few-shot learning benchmark, Meta-Dataset, and demonstrate the benefits of POEM over other meta-learning methods at representation learning from partial observations. We further demonstrate the utility of POEM by meta-learning to represent an environment from partial views observed by an agent exploring the environment.