Meta and transfer learning are two successful families of approaches to few-shot learning. Despite highly related goals, state-of-the-art advances in each family are measured largely in isolation of each other. As a result of diverging evaluation norms, a direct or thorough comparison of different approaches is challenging. To bridge this gap, we perform a cross-family study of the best transfer and meta learners on both a large-scale meta-learning benchmark (Meta-Dataset, MD), and a transfer learning benchmark (Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark, VTAB). We find that, on average, large-scale transfer methods (Big Transfer, BiT) outperform competing approaches on MD, even when trained only on ImageNet. In contrast, meta-learning approaches struggle to compete on VTAB when trained and validated on MD. However, BiT is not without limitations, and pushing for scale does not improve performance on highly out-of-distribution MD tasks. In performing this study, we reveal a number of discrepancies in evaluation norms and study some of these in light of the performance gap. We hope that this work facilitates sharing of insights from each community, and accelerates progress on few-shot learning.

本研究对元学习和迁移学习两种方法在小样本学习领域的应用进行了交叉研究，以 Meta-Dataset 和 Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark 两个基准测试集进行了测试，发现大规模的迁移学习方法表现最佳。

在一个统一的少样本分类基准上比较迁移学习和元学习方法