TAFE-Net: Task-Aware Feature Embeddings for Efficient Learning and Inference.

Learning good feature embeddings for images often requires substantial training data. As a consequence, in settings where training data is limited (e.g., few-shot and zero-shot learning), we are typically forced to use a general feature embedding across prediction tasks. Ideally, we would like to construct feature embeddings that are tuned for the given task and even input image. In this work, we propose Task-Aware Feature Embedding Networks (TAFE-Nets) to learn how to adapt the image representation to a new task in a meta-learning fashion. Our network is composed of a meta learner and a prediction network, where the meta learner generates parameters for the feature layers in the prediction network based on a task input so that the feature embedding can be accurately adjusted for that task. We show that our TAFE-Net is highly effective in generalizing to new tasks or concepts and offers efficient prediction with low computational cost. We demonstrate the general applicability of TAFE-Net in several tasks including zero-shot/ few-shot learning and dynamic efficient prediction. Our networks exceed or match the state-of-the-art on most tasks. In particular, our approach improves the prediction accuracy of unseen attribute-object pairs by 4 to 15 points on the challenging visual attributes composition task.