arXiv is a repository of electronic preprints approved for posting after moderation, but not full peer review. It consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, mathematical finance and economics, which can be accessed online.

Many machine learning articles will be posted on arXiv before publication. In theoretical computer science and machine learning, over 60% of published papers have arXiv e-prints (Sutton et al. 2017).

Few-shot learning methods have been developed to explicitly optimize machine learning models that predict new classes using only a few labelled examples per class. Few-shot learners use prior knowledge, and can generalize to new tasks containing only a few samples with supervised information (Wang et al., 2020).