Meta-Learning

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Overview

Meta-learning studies how experience across related tasks can prepare a model to learn a new task from a small support set, brief feedback, or context alone. Common approaches include gradient-based initialization methods such as MAML, metric and prototype methods, Bayesian methods, learned optimizers and hypernetworks, and episodic training for in-context or test-time adaptation. Applications range from few-shot vision and domain-shifted control to AutoML, scientific system identification, and language or robotic agents, where fast adaptation can reduce labeling, retraining, or optimization costs. The central challenge is transferring useful shared structure without negative transfer: task diversity, distribution shift, uncertainty, costly bilevel training, and fair evaluation of adaptation remain active concerns.

Latest papers

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166 papers20 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Mar 27, 2026

Meta-Learned Adaptive Optimization for Robust Human Mesh Recovery with Uncertainty-Aware Parameter Updates

Human mesh recovery from single images remains challenging due to inherent depth ambiguity and limited generalization across domains. While recent methods combine regression and optimization approaches, they struggle with poor initialization for test-time refinement and inefficient parameter updates during optimization. We propose a novel meta-learning framework that trains models to produce optimization-friendly initializations while incorporating uncertainty-aware adaptive updates during test-time refinement. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) a meta-learning strategy that simulates test-time optimization during training to learn better parameter initializations, (2) a selective parameter caching mechanism that identifies and freezes converged joints to reduce computational overhead, and (3) distribution-based adaptive updates that sample parameter changes from learned distributions, enabling robust exploration while quantifying uncertainty. Additionally, we employ stochastic approximation techniques to handle intractable gradients in complex loss landscapes. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing MPJPE by 10.3 on 3DPW and 8.0 on Human3.6M compared to strong baselines. Our approach shows superior domain adaptation capabilities with minimal performance degradation across different environmental conditions, while providing meaningful uncertainty estimates that correlate with actual prediction errors. Combining meta-learning and adaptive optimization enables accurate mesh recovery and robust generalization to challenging scenarios.

Shaurjya Mandal, Nutan Sharma, John Galeotti

Human Mesh RecoveryTest-Time OptimizationMeta-Learning
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Mar 26, 2026

Few-Shot Left Atrial Wall Segmentation in 3D LGE MRI via Meta-Learning

Segmenting the left atrial (LA) wall from late gadolinium enhancement magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) is challenging because of its thin geometry, low contrast, and limited expert annotations. We propose a model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) framework with a 3D residual U-Net backbone for K-shot (K = 5, 10, 20) LA wall segmentation. The framework is meta-trained on LA wall tasks together with auxiliary LA and right atrial (RA) cavity tasks and uses a boundary-aware composite loss to improve thin-structure delineation. We evaluated MAML on a held-out clean test set and assessed its robustness under an unseen synthetic domain shift and on a local cohort. On the held-out clean test set, MAML outperformed the K-shot fine-tuning baseline at 5-shot, achieving Dice coefficient (DSC) = 0.54 versus 0.48 and Hausdorff distance (HD95) = 4.60 versus 6.40 mm. At 20-shot, MAML approached the fully supervised model trained from scratch, with DSC = 0.59 versus 0.61. Under unseen shifts, performance decreased relative to clean testing but improved consistently as K increased. At 5-shot, MAML achieved DSC = 0.52 and HD95 = 5.02 mm under the unseen synthetic shift, and DSC = 0.50 and HD95 = 5.43 mm on the local cohort. These results suggest that meta-learning can improve thin-wall delineation in low-shot adaptation and may reduce the annotation burden for atrial remodeling assessment.

Yusri Al-Sanaani, Rebecca Thornhill, Pablo Nery +5

Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada · Department of Radiology, Radiation Oncology, and Medical Physics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada · Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, University of Ottawa Heart Institute, Ottawa, Canada

Medical Image Segmentation3D Medical Image SegmentationFew-Shot Medical Image SegmentationCardiac MRIMeta-Learning
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Mar 23, 2026

A Foundation Model for Instruction-Conditioned In-Context Time Series Tasks

In-context learning (ICL) enables task adaptation at inference time by conditioning on demonstrations rather than updating model parameters. Although recent time-series foundation models incorporate contextual conditioning, retrieval, or example-based prompting, they typically rely on implicit positional structure or task-specific objectives rather than explicit instruction-conditioned input-output demonstrations. We introduce iAmTime, a time-series foundation model trained with instruction-conditioned amortized meta-learning to infer tasks directly from example demonstrations. iAmTime represents each episode as a structured prompt over historical context and future-known variables using specialized semantic tokens that attend to designated time-series regions, exchange information across demonstrations, and inject task information into the query representation. The model combines a Hierarchical Multi-Scope Transformer Encoder, which captures temporal and covariate dynamics while inferring latent task structure from demonstrated input-output mappings, with a Task-Conditioned Patch Decoder, which adapts decoding through expert-based routing. We train iAmTime on large-scale real and synthetic corpora using supervised and self-supervised instruction-conditioned tasks, including forecasting, imputation, reconstruction, classification, anomaly detection, and source de-mixing. Across diverse domains, frequencies, and horizons, iAmTime improves zero-shot adaptation over strong time-series foundation baselines on probabilistic and point forecasting benchmarks, while achieving competitive or superior performance on four non-forecasting tasks.

Anish Saha, Konstantin Shmakov

Walmart Sunnyvale, USA

Zero-Shot Time Series ForecastingMeta-LearningIn-Context LearningTime-Series Foundation Models
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Mar 23, 2026

SOLAR: A Self-Optimizing Open-Ended Autonomous Agent for Lifelong Learning and Continual Adaptation

Despite the remarkable success of large language models (LLMs), they still face bottlenecks while deploying in dynamic, real-world settings with primary challenges being concept drift and the high cost of gradient-based adaptation. Traditional fine-tuning (FT) struggles to adapt to non-stationary data streams without resulting in catastrophic for getting or requiring extensive manual data curation. To address these limitations within the streaming and continual learning paradigm, we propose the Self-Optimizing Lifelong Autonomous Reasoner (SOLAR) which is an open-ended autonomous agent that leverages parameter-level meta-learning to self-improve, treating model weights as an environment for exploration. It initiates the process by consolidating a strong prior over common-sense knowledge making it effective for transfer-learning. By utilizing a multi-level reinforcement learning approach, SOLAR autonomously discovers adaptation strategies, enabling efficient test-time adaptation to unseen domains. Crucially, SOLAR maintains an evolving knowledge base of valid modification strategies, implicitly acting as an episodic memory buffer to balance plasticity (adaptation to new tasks) and stability (retention of meta-knowledge). Experiments demonstrate that SOLAR outperforms strong baselines on common-sense, mathematical, medical, coding, social and logical reasoning tasks, marking a significant step toward autonomous agents capable of lifelong adaptation in evolving environments.

Nitin Vetcha, Dianbo Liu

Department of Ophthalmology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore · Department of Computational and Data Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

Continual Learning for LLM AgentsContinual Learning for LLMsRL for LLM AgentsMeta-LearningTest-Time AdaptationMemory-Augmented Language Model Agents
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Mar 22, 2026

Statistical Learning for Latent Embedding Alignment with Application to Brain Encoding and Decoding

Brain encoding and decoding aims to understand the relationship between external stimuli and brain activities, and is a fundamental problem in neuroscience. In this article, we study latent embedding alignment for brain encoding and decoding, with a focus on improving sample efficiency under limited fMRI-stimulus paired data and substantial subject heterogeneity. We propose a lightweight alignment framework equipped with two statistical learning components: inverse semi-supervised learning that leverages abundant unpaired stimulus embeddings through inverse mapping and residual debiasing, and meta transfer learning that borrows strength from pretrained models across subjects via sparse aggregation and residual correction. Both methods operate exclusively at the alignment stage while keeping encoders and decoders frozen, allowing for efficient computation, modular deployment, and rigorous theoretical analysis. We establish finite-sample generalization bounds and safety guarantees, and demonstrate competitive empirical performance on the large-scale fMRI-image reconstruction benchmark data.

Shuoxun Xu, Zhanhao Yan, Lexin Li

University of California at Berkeley

Latent Space AlignmentNeural DecodingNeural EncodingfMRI-Based Visual DecodingMeta-LearningSemi-Supervised Learning
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Mar 20, 2026

Meta-Learning for Repeated Bayesian Persuasion

Classical Bayesian persuasion studies how a sender influences receivers through carefully designed signaling policies within a single strategic interaction. In many real-world environments, such interactions are repeated across multiple games, creating opportunities to exploit structural similarity across tasks. In this work, we introduce Meta-Persuasion algorithms, establishing the first line of theoretical results for both full-feedback and bandit-feedback settings in the Online Bayesian Persuasion (OBP) and Markov Persuasion Process (MPP) frameworks. We show that our proposed meta-persuasion algorithms achieve provably sharper regret rates under natural notions of task similarity, improving upon the best-known convergence rates for both OBP and MPP. At the same time, they recover the standard single-game guarantees when the sequence of games is picked arbitrarily. Finally, we complement our theoretical analysis with numerical experiments that highlight our regret improvements and the benefits of meta-learning in repeated persuasion environments.

Ata Poyraz Turna, Asrin Efe Yorulmaz, Tamer Başar

Bogazici University · University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign

Bayesian PersuasionMeta-Learning
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Mar 20, 2026

Integrating Meta-Features with Knowledge Graph Embeddings for Meta-Learning

The vast collection of machine learning records available on the web presents a significant opportunity for meta-learning, where past experiments are leveraged to improve performance. Two crucial meta-learning tasks are pipeline performance estimation (PPE), which predicts pipeline performance on target datasets, and dataset performance-based similarity estimation (DPSE), which identifies datasets with similar performance patterns. Existing approaches primarily rely on dataset meta-features (e.g., number of instances, class entropy, etc.) to represent datasets numerically and approximate these meta-learning tasks. However, these approaches often overlook the wealth of past experimental results and pipeline metadata available. This limits their ability to capture dataset - pipeline interactions that reveal performance similarity patterns. In this work, we propose KGmetaSP, a knowledge-graph-embeddings approach that leverages existing experiment data to capture these interactions and improve both PPE and DPSE. We represent datasets and pipelines within a unified knowledge graph (KG) and derive embeddings that support pipeline-agnostic meta-models for PPE and distance-based retrieval for DPSE. To validate our approach, we construct a large-scale benchmark comprising 144,177 OpenML experiments, enabling a rich cross-dataset evaluation. KGmetaSP enables accurate PPE using a single pipeline-agnostic meta-model and improves DPSE over baselines. The proposed KGmetaSP, KG, and benchmark are released, establishing a new reference point for meta-learning and demonstrating how consolidating open experiment data into a unified KG advances the field.

Antonis Klironomos, Ioannis Dasoulas, Francesco Periti +4

Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence, Germany · University of Mannheim, Germany · KU Leuven, Belgium +3

Meta-LearningAutomated Machine Learning
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Mar 20, 2026

Bounded Coupled AI Learning Dynamics in Tri-Hierarchical Drone Swarms

Modern autonomous multi-agent systems combine heterogeneous learning mechanisms operating at different timescales. An open question remains: can one formally guarantee that coupled dynamics of such mechanisms stay within the admissible operational regime? This paper studies a tri-hierarchical swarm learning system where three mechanisms act simultaneously: (1) local Hebbian online learning at individual agent level (fast timescale, 10-100 ms); (2) multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for tactical group coordination (medium timescale, 1-10 s); (3) meta-learning (MAML) for strategic adaptation (slow timescale, 10-100 s). Four results are established. The Bounded Total Error Theorem shows that under contractual constraints on learning rates, Lipschitz continuity of inter-level mappings, and weight stabilization, total suboptimality admits a component-wise upper bound uniform in time. The Bounded Representation Drift Theorem gives a worst-case estimate of how Hebbian updates affect coordination-level embeddings during one MARL cycle. The Meta-Level Compatibility Theorem provides sufficient conditions under which strategic adaptation preserves lower-level invariants. The Non-Accumulation Theorem proves that error does not grow unboundedly over time.

Oleksii Bychkov

Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

Swarm RoboticsMulti-Agent Reinforcement LearningMeta-Learning
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Mar 19, 2026

SwiftGS: Episodic Priors for Immediate Satellite Surface Recovery

Rapid, large-scale 3D reconstruction from multi-date satellite imagery is vital for environmental monitoring, urban planning, and disaster response, yet remains difficult due to illumination changes, sensor heterogeneity, and the cost of per-scene optimization. We introduce SwiftGS, a meta-learned system that reconstructs 3D surfaces in a single forward pass by predicting geometry-radiation-decoupled Gaussian primitives together with a lightweight SDF, replacing expensive per-scene fitting with episodic training that captures transferable priors. The model couples a differentiable physics graph for projection, illumination, and sensor response with spatial gating that blends sparse Gaussian detail and global SDF structure, and incorporates semantic-geometric fusion, conditional lightweight task heads, and multi-view supervision from a frozen geometric teacher under an uncertainty-aware multi-task loss. At inference, SwiftGS operates zero-shot with optional compact calibration and achieves accurate DSM reconstruction and view-consistent rendering at significantly reduced computational cost, with ablations highlighting the benefits of the hybrid representation, physics-aware rendering, and episodic meta-training.

Rong Fu, Jiekai Wu, Xiaowen Ma +4

Independent Researcher

3D ReconstructionFeed-Forward 3D Reconstruction3D Gaussian SplattingRemote SensingMeta-Learning
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Mar 18, 2026

Probabilistic Federated Learning on Uncertain and Heterogeneous Data with Model Personalization

Conventional federated learning (FL) frameworks often suffer from training degradation due to data uncertainty and heterogeneity across local clients. Probabilistic approaches such as Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) can mitigate this issue by explicitly modeling uncertainty, but they introduce additional runtime, latency, and bandwidth overhead that has rarely been studied in federated settings. To address these challenges, we propose Meta-BayFL, a personalized probabilistic FL method that combines meta-learning with BNNs to improve training under uncertain and heterogeneous data. The framework is characterized by three main features: (1) BNN-based client models incorporate uncertainty across hidden layers to stabilize training on small and noisy datasets, (2) meta-learning with adaptive learning rates enables personalized updates that enhance local training under non-IID conditions, and (3) a unified probabilistic and personalized design improves the robustness of global model aggregation. We provide a theoretical convergence analysis and characterize the upper bound of the global model over communication rounds. In addition, we evaluate computational costs (runtime, latency, and communication) and discuss the feasibility of deployment on resource-constrained devices such as edge nodes and IoT systems. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet show that Meta-BayFL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including both standard and personalized FL approaches (e.g., pFedMe, Ditto, FedFomo), with up to 7.42% higher test accuracy.

Ratun Rahman, Dinh C. Nguyen

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA

Federated LearningHeterogeneous Federated LearningNon-IID Federated LearningMeta-Learning
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Mar 18, 2026

Variational Rectification Inference for Learning with Noisy Labels

Label noise has been broadly observed in real-world datasets. To mitigate the negative impact of overfitting to label noise for deep models, effective strategies (e.g., re-weighting, or loss rectification) have been broadly applied in prevailing approaches, which have been generally learned under the meta-learning scenario. Despite the robustness of noise achieved by the probabilistic meta-learning models, they usually suffer from model collapse that degenerates generalization performance. In this paper, we propose variational rectification inference (VRI) to formulate the adaptive rectification for loss functions as an amortized variational inference problem and derive the evidence lower bound under the meta-learning framework. Specifically, VRI is constructed as a hierarchical Bayes by treating the rectifying vector as a latent variable, which can rectify the loss of the noisy sample with the extra randomness regularization and is, therefore, more robust to label noise. To achieve the inference of the rectifying vector, we approximate its conditional posterior with an amortization meta-network. By introducing the variational term in VRI, the conditional posterior is estimated accurately and avoids collapsing to a Dirac delta function, which can significantly improve the generalization performance. The elaborated meta-network and prior network adhere to the smoothness assumption, enabling the generation of reliable rectification vectors. Given a set of clean meta-data, VRI can be efficiently meta-learned within the bi-level optimization programming. Besides, theoretical analysis guarantees that the meta-network can be efficiently learned with our algorithm. Comprehensive comparison experiments and analyses validate its effectiveness for robust learning with noisy labels, particularly in the presence of open-set noise.

Haoliang Sun, Qi Wei, Lei Feng +4

School of Software, Shandong University, Jinan, China. · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. · School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore. +1

Learning with Noisy LabelsVariational InferenceMeta-Learning
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Mar 17, 2026

MetaClaw: Just Talk -- An Agent That Meta-Learns and Evolves in the Wild

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used for complex tasks, yet deployed agents often remain static, failing to adapt as user needs evolve. This creates a tension between the need for continuous service and the necessity of updating capabilities to match shifting task distributions. On platforms like OpenClaw, which handle diverse workloads across 20+ channels, existing methods either store raw trajectories without distilling knowledge, maintain static skill libraries, or require disruptive downtime for retraining. We present MetaClaw, a continual meta-learning framework that jointly evolves a base LLM policy and a library of reusable behavioral skills. MetaClaw employs two complementary mechanisms. Skill-driven fast adaptation analyzes failure trajectories via an LLM evolver to synthesize new skills, enabling immediate improvement with zero downtime. Opportunistic policy optimization performs gradient-based updates via cloud LoRA fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning with a Process Reward Model (RL-PRM). This is triggered during user-inactive windows by the Opportunistic Meta-Learning Scheduler (OMLS), which monitors system inactivity and calendar data. These mechanisms are mutually reinforcing: a refined policy generates better trajectories for skill synthesis, while richer skills provide higher-quality data for policy optimization. To prevent data contamination, a versioning mechanism separates support and query data. Built on a proxy-based architecture, MetaClaw scales to production-size LLMs without local GPUs. Experiments on MetaClaw-Bench and AutoResearchClaw show that skill-driven adaptation improves accuracy by up to 32% relative. The full pipeline advances Kimi-K2.5 accuracy from 21.4% to 40.6% and increases composite robustness by 18.3%. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/MetaClaw.

Peng Xia, Jianwen Chen, Xinyu Yang +10

UNC-Chapel Hill · Carnegie Mellon University · UC Santa Cruz +1

Continual Learning for LLM AgentsLLM Agent Skill LearningMeta-Learning
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Mar 15, 2026

Learning to Order: Task Sequencing as In-Context Optimization

Task sequencing (TS) is one of the core open problems in Deep Learning, arising in a plethora of real-world domains, from robotic assembly lines to autonomous driving. Unfortunately, prior work has not convincingly demonstrated the generalization ability of meta-learned TS methods to solve new TS problems, given few initial demonstrations. In this paper, we demonstrate that deep neural networks can meta-learn over an infinite prior of synthetically generated TS problems and achieve a few-shot generalization. We meta-learn a transformer-based architecture over datasets of sequencing trajectories generated from a prior distribution that samples sequencing problems as paths in directed graphs. In a large-scale experiment, we provide ample empirical evidence that our meta-learned models discover optimal task sequences significantly quicker than non-meta-learned baselines.

Jan Kobiolka, Christian Frey, Arlind Kadra +2

Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Technology Nuremberg, Germany · Department of Computer Science, Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany

Meta-Learning
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Mar 13, 2026

MetaKE: Meta-Learning for Knowledge Editing Toward a Better Accuracy-Editability Trade-off

Existing locate-then-edit Knowledge Editing (KE) methods typically decompose editing into two stages: upstream target representation optimization and downstream constrained parameter optimization. The optimization across the two stages is disconnected: upstream applies uniform regularization without observing downstream realization of the planned residual, hindering a refined accuracy-editability trade-off. Since this realization is request-specific and depends on downstream constraints, uniform regularization can over-shrink high-association requests, causing insufficient editing, while it can under-regularize low-association requests, producing over-large planned residuals that reduce downstream editability. To bridge this disconnect, we propose MetaKE (Meta-learning for Knowledge Editing), a new framework that unifies upstream and downstream stages into a bi-level optimization problem. The inner level optimizes parameter updates for the target representation, while the outer level optimizes representation using feedback from downstream constraints, achieving a better semantic accuracy-editability trade-off. To avoid costly multi-layer backpropagation, we introduce a Structural Gradient Proxy to approximate and propagate this feedback. Extensive experiments show that MetaKE outperforms strong baselines, offering a new perspective on KE.

Shuxin Liu, Di Gao, Ou Wu

Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou 310024, China

Knowledge EditingLanguage Model EditingMeta-Learning
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Mar 12, 2026

Deployment-Oriented Session-wise Meta-Calibration for Landmark-Based Webcam Gaze Tracking

Practical webcam gaze tracking is constrained not only by error, but also by calibration burden, robustness to head motion and session drift, runtime footprint, and browser use. We therefore target a deployment-oriented operating point rather than the image large-backbone regime. We cast landmark-based point-of-regard estimation as session-wise adaptation: a shared geometric encoder produces embeddings that can be aligned to a new session from a small calibration set. We present Equivariant Meta-Calibrated Gaze (EMC-Gaze), a lightweight landmark-only method combining an E(3)-equivariant landmark-graph encoder, local eye geometry, binocular emphasis, auxiliary 3D gaze-direction supervision, and a closed-form ridge calibrator differentiated through episodic meta-training. To reduce pose leakage, we use a two-view canonicalization consistency loss. The deployed predictor uses only facial landmarks and fits a per-session ridge head from brief calibration. In a fixation-style interactive evaluation over 33 sessions at 100 cm, EMC-Gaze achieves 5.79 +/- 1.81 deg RMSE after 9-point calibration versus 6.68 +/- 2.34 deg for Elastic Net; the gain is larger on still-head queries (2.92 +/- 0.75 deg vs. 4.45 +/- 0.30 deg). Across three subject holdouts of 10 subjects each, EMC-Gaze retains an advantage (5.66 +/- 0.19 deg vs. 6.49 +/- 0.33 deg). On MPIIFaceGaze with short per-session calibration, the eye-focused model reaches 8.82 +/- 1.21 deg at 16-shot calibration, ties Elastic Net at 1-shot, and outperforms it from 3-shot onward. The exported eye-focused encoder has 944,423 parameters, is 4.76 MB in ONNX, and supports calibrated browser prediction in 12.58/12.58/12.90 ms per sample (mean/median/p90) in Chromium 145 with ONNX Runtime Web. These results position EMC-Gaze as a calibration-friendly operating point rather than a universal state-of-the-art claim against heavier appearance-based systems.

Chenkai Zhang

Independent Researcher, Wenzhou, Zhejiang 325000, China

Gaze EstimationEye TrackingMeta-Learning
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Mar 10, 2026

MetaDAT: Generalizable Trajectory Prediction via Meta Pre-training and Data-Adaptive Test-Time Updating

Existing trajectory prediction methods exhibit significant performance degradation under distribution shifts during test time. Although test-time training techniques have been explored to enable adaptation, current approaches rely on an offline pre-trained predictor that lacks online learning flexibility. Moreover, they depend on fixed online model updating rules that do not accommodate the specific characteristics of test data. To address these limitations, we first propose a meta-learning framework to directly optimize the predictor for fast and accurate online adaptation, which performs bi-level optimization on the performance of simulated test-time adaptation tasks during pre-training. Furthermore, at test time, we introduce a data-adaptive model updating mechanism that dynamically adjusts the predefined learning rates and updating frequencies based on online partial derivatives and hard sample selection. This mechanism enables the online learning rate to suit the test data, and focuses on informative hard samples to enhance efficiency. Experiments are conducted on various challenging cross-dataset distribution shift scenarios, including nuScenes, Lyft, and Waymo. Results demonstrate that our method achieves superior adaptation accuracy, surpassing state-of-the-art test-time training methods for trajectory prediction. Additionally, our method excels under suboptimal learning rates and high FPS demands, showcasing its robustness and practicality.

Yuning Wang, Pu Zhang, Yuan He +2

State Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, IAIR, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China · KargoBot, China

Adaptive Learning RateTrajectory PredictionTest-Time AdaptationVehicle Trajectory PredictionMeta-Learning
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Mar 9, 2026

Tactile Recognition of Both Shapes and Materials with Automatic Feature Optimization-Enabled Meta Learning

Tactile perception is indispensable for robots to implement various manipulations dexterously, especially in contact-rich scenarios. However, alongside the development of deep learning techniques, it meanwhile suffers from training data scarcity and a time-consuming learning process in practical applications since the collection of a large amount of tactile data is costly and sometimes even impossible. Hence, we propose an automatic feature optimization-enabled prototypical network to realize meta-learning, i.e., AFOP-ML framework. As a ``learn to learn" network, it not only adapts to new unseen classes rapidly with few-shot, but also learns how to determine the optimal feature space automatically. Based on the four-channel signals acquired from a tactile finger, both shapes and materials are recognized. On a 36-category benchmark, it outperforms several existing approaches by attaining an accuracy of 96.08% in 5-way-1-shot scenario, where only 1 example is available for training. It still remains 88.7% in the extreme 36-way-1-shot case. The generalization ability is further validated through three groups of experiment involving unseen shapes, materials and force/speed perturbations. More insights are additionally provided by this work for the interpretation of recognition tasks and improved design of tactile sensors.

Hongliang Zhao, Wenhui Yang, Yang Chen +3

School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China. · State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 10081, China · State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, China.

Robotic Tactile SensingMeta-LearningFew-Shot LearningTactile Sensing
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Mar 6, 2026

Metalearning traffic assignment for network disruptions with graph convolutional neural networks

Building machine-learning models for estimating traffic flows from OD matrices requires an appropriate design of the training process and a training dataset spanning over multiple regimes and dynamics. As machine-learning models rely heavily on historical data, their predictions are typically accurate only when future traffic patterns resemble those observed during training. However, their performance often degrades when there is a significant statistical discrepancy between historical and future conditions. This issue is particularly relevant in traffic forecasting when predictions are required for modified versions of the network, where the underlying graph structure changes due to events such as maintenance, public demonstrations, flooding, or other extreme disruptions. Ironically, these are precisely the situations in which reliable traffic predictions are most needed. In the presented work, we combine a machine-learning model (graph convolutional neural network) with a meta-learning architecture to train the former to quickly adapt to new graph structures and demand patterns, so that it may easily be applied to scenarios in which changes in the road network (the graph) and the demand (the node features) happen simultaneously. Our results show that the use of meta-learning allows the graph neural network to quickly adapt to unseen graphs (network closures) and OD matrixes while easing the burden of designing a training dataset that covers all relevant patterns for the practitioners. The proposed architecture achieves a R^2 of around 0.85 over unseen closures and OD matrixes.

Serio Agriesti, Guido Cantelmo, Francisco Camara Pereira

Department of Technology, Management and Economics, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark

Traffic Flow EstimationIntelligent Transportation SystemsMeta-Learning
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Mar 4, 2026

Robust Unscented Kalman Filtering via Recurrent Meta-Adaptation of Sigma-Point Weights

The Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) is a ubiquitous tool for nonlinear state estimation; however, its performance is limited by the static parameterization of the Unscented Transform (UT). Conventional weighting schemes, governed by fixed scaling parameters, assume implicit Gaussianity and fail to adapt to time-varying dynamics or heavy-tailed measurement noise. This work introduces the Meta-Adaptive UKF (MA-UKF), a framework that reformulates sigma-point weight synthesis as a hyperparameter optimization problem addressed via memory-augmented meta-learning. Unlike standard adaptive filters that rely on instantaneous heuristic corrections, our approach employs a Recurrent Context Encoder to compress the history of measurement innovations into a compact latent embedding. This embedding informs a policy network that dynamically synthesizes the mean and covariance weights of the sigma points at each time step, effectively governing the filter's trust in the prediction versus the measurement. By optimizing the system end-to-end through the filter's recursive logic, the MA-UKF learns to maximize tracking accuracy while maintaining estimation consistency. Numerical benchmarks on maneuvering targets demonstrate that the MA-UKF significantly outperforms standard baselines, exhibiting superior robustness to non-Gaussian glint noise and effective generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) dynamic regimes unseen during training.

Kenan Majewski, Michał Modzelewski, Marcin Żugaj +1

Institute of Aeronautics and Applied Mechanics, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

Unscented Kalman FilteringRobust EstimationMeta-Learning
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Mar 3, 2026

Test-Time Meta-Adaptation with Self-Synthesis

As strong general reasoners, large language models (LLMs) encounter diverse domains and tasks, where the ability to adapt and self-improve at test time is valuable. We introduce MASS, a meta-learning framework that enables LLMs to self-adapt by generating problem-specific synthetic training data and performing targeted self-updates optimized for downstream performance at inference time. We train this behavior end-to-end via bilevel optimization: an inner loop adapts on self-generated examples while an outer loop meta-learns data-attribution signals and rewards post-update task performance. The synthetic data is optimized with scalable meta-gradients, backpropagating the downstream loss through the inner updates to reward useful generations. Experiments on mathematical reasoning show that MASS learns to synthesize per-instance curricula that yield effective, data-efficient test-time adaptation.

Zeyneb N. Kaya, Nick Rui

Stanford University

Inference-Time Adaptation of Language ModelsTest-Time AdaptationLanguage Model Self-ImprovementMeta-LearningSynthetic Data Generation for Language Models
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Feb 28, 2026

Boosting Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Text Classification via Label-guided Distance Scaling

Few-shot text classification aims to recognize unseen classes with limited labeled text samples. Existing approaches focus on boosting meta-learners by developing complex algorithms in the training stage. However, the labeled samples are randomly selected during the testing stage, so they may not provide effective supervision signals, leading to misclassification. To address this issue, we propose a Label-guided Distance Scaling (LDS) strategy. The core of our method is exploiting label semantics as supervision signals in both the training and testing stages. Specifically, in the training stage, we design a label-guided loss to inject label semantic information, pulling closer the sample representations and corresponding label representations. In the testing stage, we propose a Label-guided Scaler which scales sample representations with label semantics to provide additional supervision signals. Thus, even if labeled sample representations are far from class centers, our Label-guided Scaler pulls them closer to their class centers, thereby mitigating the misclassification. We combine two common meta-learners to verify the effectiveness of the method. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models. All datasets and codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Label-guided-Text-Classification.

Yunlong Gao, Xinyue Liu, Yingbo Wang +2

Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China

Few-Shot Text ClassificationText ClassificationMeta-LearningMetric Learning
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Feb 26, 2026

Relatron: Automating Relational Machine Learning over Relational Databases

Predictive modeling over relational databases (RDBs) powers applications, yet remains challenging due to capturing both cross-table dependencies and complex feature interactions. Relational Deep Learning (RDL) methods automate feature engineering via message passing, while classical approaches like Deep Feature Synthesis (DFS) rely on predefined non-parametric aggregators. Despite performance gains, the comparative advantages of RDL over DFS and the design principles for selecting effective architectures remain poorly understood. We present a comprehensive study that unifies RDL and DFS in a shared design space and conducts architecture-centric searches across diverse RDB tasks. Our analysis yields three key findings: (1) RDL does not consistently outperform DFS, with performance being highly task-dependent; (2) no single architecture dominates across tasks, underscoring the need for task-aware model selection; and (3) validation accuracy is an unreliable guide for architecture choice. This search yields a model performance bank that links architecture configurations to their performance; leveraging this bank, we analyze the drivers of the RDL-DFS performance gap and introduce two task signals -- RDB task homophily and an affinity embedding that captures size, path, feature, and temporal structure -- whose correlation with the gap enables principled routing. Guided by these signals, we propose Relatron, a task embedding-based meta-selector that chooses between RDL and DFS and prunes the within-family search. Lightweight loss-landscape metrics further guard against brittle checkpoints by preferring flatter optima. In experiments, Relatron resolves the "more tuning, worse performance" effect and, in joint hyperparameter-architecture optimization, achieves up to 18.5% improvement over strong baselines with 10x lower cost than Fisher information-based alternatives.

Zhikai Chen, Han Xie, Jian Zhang +3

Michigan State University · Amazon

Relational Deep LearningModel SelectionAutomated Feature EngineeringRelational DatabasesMeta-Learning
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Feb 25, 2026

Meta-FC: Meta-Learning with Feature Consistency for Robust and Generalizable Watermarking

Deep learning-based watermarking has made remarkable progress in recent years. To achieve robustness against various distortions, current methods commonly adopt a training strategy where a single random distortion (SRD) is chosen as the noise layer in each training batch. However, the SRD strategy treats distortions independently within each batch, neglecting the inherent relationships among different types of distortions and causing optimization conflicts across batches. As a result, the robustness and generalizability of the watermarking model are limited. To address this issue, we propose a novel training strategy that enhances robustness and generalization via meta-learning with feature consistency (Meta-FC). Specifically, we randomly sample multiple distortions from the noise pool to construct a meta-training task, while holding out one distortion as a simulated ``unknown'' distortion for the meta-testing phase. Through meta-learning, the model is encouraged to identify and utilize neurons that exhibit stable activations across different types of distortions, mitigating the optimization conflicts caused by the random sampling of diverse distortions in each batch. To further promote the transformation of stable activations into distortion-invariant representations, we introduce a feature consistency loss that constrains the decoded features of the same image subjected to different distortions to remain consistent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared to the SRD training strategy, Meta-FC improves the robustness and generalization of various watermarking models by an average of 1.59%, 4.71%, and 2.38% under high-intensity, combined, and unknown distortions.

Yuheng Li, Weitong Chen, Chengcheng Zhu +4

Yangzhou University · Nanjing University · Shandong University +2

Robust WatermarkingMeta-LearningOOD Generalization
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Feb 24, 2026

AHC: Meta-Learned Adaptive Compression for Continual Object Detection on Memory-Constrained Microcontrollers

Deploying continual object detection on microcontrollers (MCUs) with under 100KB memory requires efficient feature compression that can adapt to evolving task distributions. Existing approaches rely on fixed compression strategies (e.g., FiLM conditioning) that cannot adapt to heterogeneous task characteristics, leading to suboptimal memory utilization and catastrophic forgetting. We introduce Adaptive Hierarchical Compression (AHC), a meta-learning framework featuring three key innovations: (1) true MAML-based compression that adapts via gradient descent to each new task in just 5 inner-loop steps, (2) hierarchical multi-scale compression with scale-aware ratios (8:1 for P3, 6.4:1 for P4, 4:1 for P5) matching FPN redundancy patterns, and (3) a dual-memory architecture combining short-term and long-term banks with importance-based consolidation under a hard 100KB budget. We provide formal theoretical guarantees bounding catastrophic forgetting as O(ε{sq.root(T)} + 1/{sq.root(M)}) where ε is compression error, T is task count, and M is memory size. Experiments on CORe50, TiROD, and PASCAL VOC benchmarks with three standard baselines (Fine-tuning,EWC, iCaRL) demonstrate that AHC enables practical continual detection within a 100KB replay budget, achieving competitive accuracy through mean-pooled compressed feature replay combined with EWC regularization and feature distillation.

Bibin Wilson

Independent Researcher

Continual Object DetectionObject DetectionModel CompressionMemory-Efficient TrainingMeta-LearningReplay-Based Continual Learning
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Feb 24, 2026

MAML-KT: Addressing Cold Start Problem in Knowledge Tracing for New Students via Few-Shot Model-Agnostic Meta Learning

Knowledge tracing (KT) models are commonly evaluated by training on early interactions from all students and testing on later responses. While effective for measuring average predictive performance, this evaluation design obscures a cold start scenario that arises in deployment, where models must infer the knowledge state of previously unseen students from only a few initial interactions. Prior studies have shown that under this setting, standard empirically risk-minimized KT models such as DKT, DKVMN and SAKT exhibit substantially lower early accuracy than previously reported. We frame new-student performance prediction as a few-shot learning problem and introduce MAML-KT, a model-agnostic meta learning approach that learns an initialization optimized for rapid adaptation to new students using one or two gradient updates. We evaluate MAML-KT on ASSIST2009, ASSIST2015 and ASSIST2017 using a controlled cold start protocol that trains on a subset of students and tests on held-out learners across early interaction windows (questions 3-10 and 11-15), scaling cohort sizes from 10 to 50 students. Across datasets, MAML-KT achieves higher early accuracy than prior KT models in nearly all cold start conditions, with gains persisting as cohort size increases. On ASSIST2017, we observe a transient drop in early performance that coincides with many students encountering previously unseen skills. Further analysis suggests that these drops coincide with skill novelty rather than model instability, consistent with prior work on skill-level cold start. Overall, optimizing KT models for rapid adaptation reduces early prediction error for new students and provides a clearer lens for interpreting early accuracy fluctuations, distinguishing model limitations from genuine learning and knowledge acquisition dynamics.

Indronil Bhattacharjee, Christabel Wayllace

New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA

Knowledge TracingFew-Shot LearningMeta-Learning
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Feb 23, 2026

Meta-Learning and Meta-Reinforcement Learning -- Tracing the Path towards DeepMind's Adaptive Agent

Humans are highly effective at utilizing prior knowledge to adapt to novel tasks, a capability that standard machine learning models struggle to replicate due to their reliance on task-specific training. Meta-learning overcomes this limitation by allowing models to acquire transferable knowledge from various tasks, enabling rapid adaptation to new challenges with minimal data. This survey provides a rigorous, task-based formalization of meta-learning and meta-reinforcement learning and uses that paradigm to chronicle the landmark algorithms that paved the way for DeepMind's Adaptive Agent, consolidating the essential concepts needed to understand the Adaptive Agent and other generalist approaches.

Björn Hoppmann, Christoph Scholz

Meta-LearningMeta-Reinforcement LearningGeneralization in RL
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Feb 23, 2026

Bayesian Meta-Learning with Expert Feedback for Task-Shift Adaptation through Causal Embeddings

Meta-learning methods perform well on new within-distribution tasks but often fail when adapting to out-of-distribution target tasks, where transfer from source tasks can induce negative transfer. We propose a causally-aware Bayesian meta-learning method, by conditioning task-specific priors on precomputed latent causal task embeddings, enabling transfer based on mechanistic similarity rather than spurious correlations. Our approach explicitly considers realistic deployment settings where access to target-task data is limited, and adaptation relies on noisy (expert-provided) pairwise judgments of causal similarity between source and target tasks. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that conditioning on causal embeddings controls prior mismatch and mitigates negative transfer under task shift. Empirically, we demonstrate reductions in negative transfer and improved out-of-distribution adaptation in both controlled simulations and a large-scale real-world clinical prediction setting for cross-disease transfer, where causal embeddings align with underlying clinical mechanisms.

Lotta Mäkinen, Jorge Loría, Samuel Kaski

Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland · ELLIS Institute Finland, Espoo, Finland · Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Meta-LearningOOD GeneralizationCross-Domain Transfer Learning
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Feb 22, 2026

Celo2: Towards Learned Optimization Free Lunch

Learned optimizers are powerful alternatives to hand-designed update rules like Adam, yet they have seen limited practical adoption since they often fail to meta-generalize beyond their training distribution and incur high meta-training cost. For instance, prior work, VeLO, scaled meta-training to 4,000 TPU months (∼\sim10×\times GPT-3 compute) to meta-train a general-purpose optimizer but it failed to generalize beyond 600M parameters tasks. In this work, we present a surprising finding: by crafting a simple normalized optimizer architecture and augmenting meta-training, it becomes feasible to meta-train a performant general-purpose learned update rule on a tiny fraction of VeLO compute, 4.5 GPU hours to be precise. Our learned update rule scales stably to a billion-scale pretraining task (GPT-3 XL 1.3B) which is six orders of magnitude larger than its meta-training distribution. Furthermore, it shows strong performance across diverse out-of-distribution tasks and is compatible with modern optimization harness that includes orthogonalization, distinct update rules for input-output and hidden weights, and decoupled weight decay. In all, this work paves the way for practically applicable learnable optimization algorithms, unlocking exploration of richer meta-training and data curation recipes to further improve performance.

Abhinav Moudgil, Boris Knyazev, Eugene Belilovsky

Mila · Concordia University · Samsung AI Lab, Montreal +1

Learning to OptimizeDeep Learning OptimizationMeta-Learning
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Feb 20, 2026

Explaining AutoClustering: Uncovering Meta-Feature Contribution in AutoML for Clustering

AutoClustering methods aim to automate unsupervised learning tasks, including algorithm selection (AS), hyperparameter optimization (HPO), and pipeline synthesis (PS), by often leveraging meta-learning over dataset meta-features. While these systems often achieve strong performance, their recommendations are often difficult to justify: the influence of dataset meta-features on algorithm and hyperparameter choices is typically not exposed, limiting reliability, bias diagnostics, and efficient meta-feature engineering. This limits reliability and diagnostic insight for further improvements. In this work, we investigate the explainability of the meta-models in AutoClustering. We first review 22 existing methods and organize their meta-features into a structured taxonomy. We then apply a global explainability technique (i.e., Decision Predicate Graphs) to assess feature importance within meta-models from selected frameworks. Finally, we use local explainability tools such as SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) to analyse specific clustering decisions. Our findings highlight consistent patterns in meta-feature relevance, identify structural weaknesses in current meta-learning strategies that can distort recommendations, and provide actionable guidance for more interpretable Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) design. This study therefore offers a practical foundation for increasing decision transparency in unsupervised learning automation.

Matheus Camilo da Silva, Leonardo Arrighi, Ana Carolina Lorena +1

Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Geosciences, University of Trieste, Piazzale Europa, 1, 34127 Trieste TS, Italy. · Division of Computer Science, Aeronautics Institute of Technology, Praça Marechal Eduardo Gomes, 50, 12228-900 São José dos Campos SP, Brazil.

Automated Machine LearningMeta-LearningExplainable Artificial IntelligenceClustering
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Feb 19, 2026

Adapting Actively on the Fly: Relevance-Guided Online Meta-Learning with Latent Concepts for Geospatial Discovery

In environmental monitoring, data collection is often costly, sparse, and shaped by urgent public-health needs. This is particularly true for cancer-causing PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) contamination, where discussions with domain experts and environmental organizations highlight the need to strategically identify high-risk, under-observed regions under tight sampling budgets. More broadly, similar challenges arise in disaster response and public health settings, where dynamic environments make it essential to efficiently uncover hidden targets from limited ground truth. Yet sparse and biased geospatial labels limit the applicability of existing learning-based methods, such as reinforcement learning. To address this, we propose a unified geospatial discovery framework that integrates active learning, online meta-learning, and concept-guided reasoning. Our approach introduces two key innovations built on a shared notion of concept relevance, capturing how domain-specific factors influence target presence: a concept-weighted uncertainty sampling strategy, where uncertainty is modulated by learned relevance from readily available concepts such as land cover and source proximity; and a relevance-aware meta-batch formation strategy that promotes semantic diversity during online-meta updates, improving generalization in dynamic environments. We evaluate our framework on PFAS contamination discovery as a real-world inspired environmental monitoring task, demonstrating robust target discovery under limited data and changing conditions.

Jowaria Khan, Anindya Sarkar, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik +1

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA · Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

Adaptive SamplingActive LearningMeta-LearningGeospatial Reasoning
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