The Effect of Diversity in Meta-Learning
This work questions a fundamental assumption in meta-learning, potentially impacting researchers and practitioners who rely on diverse task distributions for model training.
The study challenges the conventional belief that task diversity improves meta-learning performance, finding that lower diversity can yield similar results and higher diversity sometimes hinders performance without significant gains.
Recent studies show that task distribution plays a vital role in the meta-learner's performance. Conventional wisdom is that task diversity should improve the performance of meta-learning. In this work, we find evidence to the contrary; (i) our experiments draw into question the efficacy of our learned models: similar manifolds can be learned with a subset of the data (lower task diversity). This finding questions the advantage of providing more data to the model, and (ii) adding diversity to the task distribution (higher task diversity) sometimes hinders the model and does not lead to a significant improvement in performance as previously believed. To strengthen our findings, we provide both empirical and theoretical evidence.