Meta-Learning with Neural Bandit Scheduler

Abstract

Meta-learning has been proven an effective learning paradigm for training machine learning models with good generalization ability. Apart from the common practice of uniformly sampling the meta-training tasks, existing methods working on task scheduling strategies are mainly based on pre-defined sampling protocols or the assumed task-model correlations, and greedily make scheduling decisions, which can lead to sub-optimal performance bottlenecks of the meta-model. In this paper, we propose a novel task scheduling framework under Contextual Bandits settings, named BASS, which directly optimizes the task scheduling strategy based on the status of the meta-model. By balancing the exploitation and exploration in meta-learning task scheduling, BASS can help tackle the challenge of limited knowledge about the task distribution during the early stage of meta-training, while simultaneously exploring potential benefits for forthcoming meta-training iterations through an adaptive exploration strategy. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments are presented to show the effectiveness of our proposed framework.