  Transfer-learning and meta-learning are two effective methods to apply
knowledge learned from large data sources to new tasks. In few-class, few-shot
target task settings (i.e. when there are only a few classes and training
examples available in the target task), meta-learning approaches that optimize
for future task learning have outperformed the typical transfer approach of
initializing model weights from a pre-trained starting point. But as we
experimentally show, meta-learning algorithms that work well in the few-class
setting do not generalize well in many-shot and many-class cases. In this
paper, we propose a joint training approach that combines both
transfer-learning and meta-learning. Benefiting from the advantages of each,
our method obtains improved generalization performance on unseen target tasks
in both few- and many-class and few- and many-shot scenarios.
