  Meta-Learning aims to speed up the learning process on new tasks by acquiring
useful inductive biases from datasets of related learning tasks. While, in
practice, the number of related tasks available is often small, most of the
existing approaches assume an abundance of tasks; making them unrealistic and
prone to overfitting. A central question in the meta-learning literature is how
to regularize to ensure generalization to unseen tasks. In this work, we
provide a theoretical analysis using the PAC-Bayesian theory and present a
generalization bound for meta-learning, which was first derived by Rothfuss et
al. (2021a). Crucially, the bound allows us to derive the closed form of the
optimal hyper-posterior, referred to as PACOH, which leads to the best
performance guarantees. We provide a theoretical analysis and empirical case
study under which conditions and to what extent these guarantees for
meta-learning improve upon PAC-Bayesian per-task learning bounds. The
closed-form PACOH inspires a practical meta-learning approach that avoids the
reliance on bi-level optimization, giving rise to a stochastic optimization
problem that is amenable to standard variational methods that scale well. Our
experiments show that, when instantiating the PACOH with Gaussian processes and
Bayesian Neural Networks models, the resulting methods are more scalable, and
yield state-of-the-art performance, both in terms of predictive accuracy and
the quality of uncertainty estimates.
