Few-shot learning (FSL) is a central problem in meta-learning, where learners must efficiently learn from few labeled examples. Within FSL, feature pre-training has recently become an increasingly popular strategy to significantly improve generalization performance. However, the contribution of pre-training is often overlooked and understudied, with limited theoretical understanding of its impact on meta-learning performance. Further, pre-training requires a consistent set of global labels shared across training tasks, which may be unavailable in practice. In this work, we address the above issues by first showing the connection between pre-training and meta-learning. We discuss why pre-training yields more robust meta-representation and connect the theoretical analysis to existing works and empirical results. Secondly, we introduce Meta Label Learning (MeLa), a novel meta-learning algorithm that learns task relations by inferring global labels across tasks. This allows us to exploit pre-training for FSL even when global labels are unavailable or ill-defined. Lastly, we introduce an augmented pre-training procedure that further improves the learned meta-representation. Empirically, MeLa outperforms existing methods across a diverse range of benchmarks, in particular under a more challenging setting where the number of training tasks is limited and labels are task-specific. We also provide extensive ablation study to highlight its key properties.

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