Meta-learning has been proposed as a framework to address the challenging few-shot learning setting. The key idea is to leverage a large number of similar few-shot tasks in order to learn how to adapt a base-learner to a new task for which only a few labeled samples are available. As deep neural networks (DNNs) tend to overfit using a few samples only, meta-learning typically uses shallow neural networks (SNNs), thus limiting its effectiveness. In this paper we propose a novel few-shot learning method called meta-transfer learning (MTL) which learns to adapt a deep NN for few shot learning tasks. Specifically, meta refers to training multiple tasks, and transfer is achieved by learning scaling and shifting functions of DNN weights for each task. In addition, we introduce the hard task (HT) meta-batch scheme as an effective learning curriculum for MTL. We conduct experiments using (5-class, 1-shot) and (5-class, 5shot) recognition tasks on two challenging few-shot learning benchmarks: miniImageNet and Fewshot-CIFAR100. Extensive comparisons to related works validate that our meta-transfer learning approach trained with the proposed HT meta-batch scheme achieves top performance. An ablation study also shows that both components contribute to fast convergence and high accuracy 1 .

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Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to learn a classification model with the number of classes increasing phase-by-phase. The inherent problem in CIL is the stability-plasticity dilemma between the learning of old and new classes, i.e., high-plasticity models easily forget old classes but high-stability models are weak to learn new classes. We alleviate this issue by proposing a novel network architecture called Meta-Aggregating Networks (MANets) in which we explicitly build two residual blocks at each residual level (taking ResNet as the baseline architecture): a stable block and a plastic block. We aggregate the output feature maps from these two blocks and then feed the results to the next-level blocks. We meta-learn the aggregating weights in order to dynamically optimize and balance between two types of blocks, i.e., between stability and plasticity. We conduct extensive experiments on three CIL benchmarks: CIFAR-100, ImageNet-Subset, and ImageNet, and show that many existing CIL methods can be straightforwardly incorporated on the architecture of MANets to boost their performance 1 .

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