Cross-Domain MetaDL: Any-Way Any-Shot Learning Competition with Novel Datasets from Practical Domains

Meta-learning aims to leverage the experience from previous tasks to solve new tasks using only little training data, train faster and/or get better performance. The proposed challenge focuses on "cross-domain meta-learning" for few-shot image classification using a novel "any-way" and "any-shot" setting. The goal is to meta-learn a good model that can quickly learn tasks from a variety of domains, with any number of classes also called "ways" (within the range 2-20) and any number of training examples per class also called "shots" (within the range 1-20). We carve such tasks from various "mother datasets" selected from diverse domains, such as healthcare, ecology, biology, manufacturing, and others. By using mother datasets from these practical domains, we aim to maximize the humanitarian and societal impact. The competition is with code submission, fully blind-tested on the CodaLab challenge platform. A single (final) submission will be evaluated during the final phase, using ten datasets previously unused by the meta-learning community. After the competition is over, it will remain active to be used as a long-lasting benchmark resource for research in this field. The scientific and technical motivations of this challenge include scalability, robustness to domain changes, and generalization ability to tasks (a.k.a. episodes) in different regimes (any-way any-shot).