Recent years have witnessed an abundance of new publications and approaches on meta-learning. This community-wide enthusiasm has sparked great insights but has also created a plethora of seemingly different frameworks, which can be hard to compare and evaluate. In this paper, we aim to provide a principled, unifying framework by revisiting and strengthening the connection between meta-learning and traditional supervised learning. By treating pairs of task-specific data sets and target models as (feature, label) samples, we can reduce many meta-learning algorithms to instances of supervised learning. This view not only unifies meta-learning into an intuitive and practical framework but also allows us to transfer insights from supervised learning directly to improve meta-learning. For example, we obtain a better understanding of generalization properties, and we can readily transfer well-understood techniques, such as model ensemble, pre-training, joint training, data augmentation, and even nearest neighbor based methods. We provide an intuitive analogy of these methods in the context of meta-learning and show that they give rise to significant improvements in model performance on few-shot learning.

本文提出了一个基于对元学习与传统监督学习之间联系的重新审视和加强的原则性统一框架，通过把任务特定数据集和目标模型看作（特征、标签）样本，我们可以把许多元学习算法归约到监督学习的实例中，进一步提高了元学习的表现。

重新审视元学习作为监督学习