NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Meta-Learning

Recent years have seen rapid progress in meta-learning methods, which transfer knowledge across tasks and domains to efficiently learn new tasks, optimize the learning process itself, and even generate new learning methods from scratch. Meta-learning can be seen as the logical conclusion of the arc that machine learning has undergone in the last decade, from learning classifiers, to learning representations, and finally to learning algorithms that themselves acquire representations, classifiers, and policies for acting in environments. In practice, meta-learning has been shown to yield new state-of-the-art automated machine learning methods, novel deep learning architectures, and substantially improved one-shot learning systems. Moreover, improving one’s own learning capabilities through experience can also be viewed as a hallmark of intelligent beings, and neuroscience shows a strong connection between human and reward learning and the growing sub-field of meta-reinforcement learning.

Some of the fundamental questions that this workshop aims to address are:
- What are the meta-learning processes in nature (e.g., in humans), and how can we take inspiration from them?
- What is the relationship between meta-learning, continual learning, and transfer learning?
- What interactions exist between meta-learning and large pretrained / foundation models?
- What principles can we learn from meta-learning to help us design the next generation of learning systems?
- What kind of theoretical principles can we develop for meta-learning?
- How can we exploit our domain knowledge to effectively guide the meta-learning process and make it more efficient?
- How can we design better benchmarks for different meta-learning scenarios?

As prospective participants, we primarily target machine learning researchers interested in the questions and foci outlined above. Specific target communities within machine learning include, but are not limited to: meta-learning, AutoML, reinforcement learning, deep learning, optimization, evolutionary computation, and Bayesian optimization. We also invite submissions from researchers who study human learning and neuroscience, to provide a broad and interdisciplinary perspective to the attendees.