title: Chameleon: Learning Model Initializations Across Tasks With Different Schemas
abstract: Parametric models, and particularly neural networks, require weight initialization as a starting point for gradient-based optimization. Recent work shows that an initial parameter set can be learned from a population of supervised learning tasks that enables a fast convergence for unseen tasks even when only a handful of instances is available (model-agnostic meta-learning). 
  Currently, methods for learning model initializations are limited to a population of tasks sharing the same schema, i.e., the same number, order, type, and semantics of predictor and target variables.
  In this paper, we address the problem of meta-learning weight initialization across tasks with different schemas, for example, if the number of predictors varies across tasks, while they still share some variables. We propose Chameleon, a model that learns to align different predictor schemas to a common representation. 
  In experiments on 23 datasets of the OpenML-CC18 benchmark, we show that Chameleon can successfully learn parameter initializations across tasks with different schemas, presenting, to the best of our knowledge, the first cross-dataset few-shot classification approach for unstructured data.
authors: Lukas Brinkmeyer Rafael Rego Drumond Randolf Scholz Josif Grabocka Lars Schmidt-Thieme
hIndex: Lars Schmidt-Thieme 45