Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: The Curse of Zero Task Diversity: On the Failure of Transfer Learning to
  Outperform MAML and their Empirical Equivalence   Recently, it has been observed that a transfer learning solution might be all
we need to solve many few-shot learning benchmarks -- thus raising important
questions about when and how meta-learning algorithms should be deployed. In
this paper, we seek to clarify these questions by proposing a novel metric --
the diversity coefficient -- to measure the diversity of tasks in a few-shot
learning benchmark. We hypothesize that the diversity coefficient of the
few-shot learning benchmark is predictive of whether meta-learning solutions
will succeed or not. Using the diversity coefficient, we show that the
MiniImagenet benchmark has zero diversity. This novel insight contextualizes
claims that transfer learning solutions are better than meta-learned solutions.
Specifically, we empirically find that a diversity coefficient of zero
correlates with a high similarity between transfer learning and Model-Agnostic
Meta-Learning (MAML) learned solutions in terms of meta-accuracy (at meta-test
time). Therefore, we conjecture meta-learned solutions have the same meta-test
performance as transfer learning when the diversity coefficient is zero. Our
work provides the first test of whether diversity correlates with meta-learning
success.

21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
36
The categories of this paper are: cmp-lg
33
The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
18
The categories of this paper are: econ
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
15
The categories of this paper are: nucl-ex
13
The categories of this paper are: quant-ph
24
The categories of this paper are: dg-ga
5
The categories of this paper are: gr-qc
22
The categories of this paper are: chao-dyn
10
The categories of this paper are: q-bio
17
The categories of this paper are: q-fin
30
The categories of this paper are: q-alg
12
The categories of this paper are: nucl-th
2
The categories of this paper are: math
16
The categories of this paper are: stat