  Handling previously unseen tasks after given only a few training examples
continues to be a tough challenge in machine learning. We propose TapNets,
neural networks augmented with task-adaptive projection for improved few-shot
learning. Here, employing a meta-learning strategy with episode-based training,
a network and a set of per-class reference vectors are learned across widely
varying tasks. At the same time, for every episode, features in the embedding
space are linearly projected into a new space as a form of quick task-specific
conditioning. The training loss is obtained based on a distance metric between
the query and the reference vectors in the projection space. Excellent
generalization results in this way. When tested on the Omniglot, miniImageNet
and tieredImageNet datasets, we obtain state of the art classification
accuracies under various few-shot scenarios.
