An Introduction to Meta-Learning

At Walmart Labs, we utilize meta-learning every day -- whether it's in our robust item catalog or item recommendations. This article will walk through what meta-learning is and how it is being used to solve practical industry problems. Meta-learning is an exciting area of research that tackles the problem of learning to learn. The goal is to design models that can learn new skills or rapidly adapt to new environments with minimal training examples. Not only does this dramatically speed up and improve the design of Machine learning (ML) pipelines or neural architectures, but it also allows us to replace hand-engineered algorithms with novel approaches learned in a data-driven way (Vanschoren, 2018).