Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human concept learning is surprisingly robust, allowing forprecise generalizations given only a few positive examples.Bayesian formulations that account for this behavior requireelaborate, pre-specified priors, leaving much of the learningprocess unexplained. More recent models of concept learningbootstrap from deep representations, but the deep neural net-works are themselves trained using millions of positive and neg-ative examples. In machine learning, recent progress in meta-learning has provided large-scale learning algorithms that canlearn new concepts from a few examples, but these approachesstill assume access to implicit negative evidence. In this paper,we formulate a training paradigm that allows a meta-learningalgorithm to solve the problem of concept learning from fewpositive examples. The algorithm discovers a taxonomic prioruseful for learning novel concepts even from held-out supercat-egories and mimics human generalization behavior—the firstto do so without hand-specified domain knowledge or negativeexamples of a novel concept.