Same Leaf, Different World: Transfer, Few-Shot and Meta-Learning, and Distribution Shift

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h

A fictional crop-disease app built in Kenya stumbles in the coffee highlands of Peru: different light, different varieties, a disease it has never seen, and only three hundred labelled photos. Agronomist Matteo Ferri and ML lead Priya Raman fix it. Part twenty of The Deep End's Machine Learning series covers transfer learning and fine-tuning, few-shot and meta-learning, domain adaptation, the many kinds of distribution shift behind real model failures, and how to keep learning without forgetting. Cross-references: ep114, ep116, ep198, parts 1, 2, 7, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 21. Fieldglass, Matteo…