Fully automating machine learning pipeline is one of the outstanding challenges of general artificial intelligence, as practical machine learning often requires costly human driven process, such as hyper-parameter tuning, algorithmic selection, and model selection. In this work, we consider the problem of executing automated, yet scalable search for finding optimal gradient based meta-learners in practice. As a solution, we apply progressive neural architecture search to proto-architectures by appealing to the model agnostic nature of general gradient based meta learners. In the presence of recent universality result of Finn \textit{et al.}\cite{finn:universality_maml:DBLP:/journals/corr/abs-1710-11622}, our search is a priori motivated in that neural network architecture search dynamics---automated or not---may be quite different from that of the classical setting with the same target tasks, due to the presence of the gradient update operator. A posteriori, our search algorithm, given appropriately designed search spaces, finds gradient based meta learners with non-intuitive proto-architectures that are narrowly deep, unlike the inception-like structures previously observed in the resulting architectures of traditional NAS algorithms. Along with these notable findings, the searched gradient based meta-learner achieves state-of-the-art results on the few shot classification problem on Mini-ImageNet with $76.29\%$ accuracy, which is an $13.18\%$ improvement over results reported in the original MAML paper. To our best knowledge, this work is the first successful AutoML implementation in the context of meta learning.

研究表明，自动化架构搜索与基于梯度的元学习相结合，能够优化元学习器，使用此技术，预测准确率提高了11.54%，在五次样本五种类的迷你图像分类问题中，最终的元学习器达到了74.65％的准确率，是目前最先进的结果之一，也是在元学习背景下第一个成功的神经架构搜索。

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