What is "episode num"?

[AndreaLombax]

In the MiniImageNetDataLoader class, there is a variable called episode_test_sample_num (used in the initializer) and another one (used in the generate_data_list method) called episode_num.
What's the functionality of these variables? It's clear that they are a different concept from epoch, but i don't get the meaning of this variable.

Im sorry if this could be a stupid question, but i'm new in Machine Learning and i'm just trying to learn.
Thanks!

[yaoyao-liu]

Thanks for your interest in our work.

An episode means a few-shot task. The variable episode_test_sample_num means the number of samples for each class in the test set of a few-shot task. episode_num means the total number of few-shot tasks used for meta-training.

For more details, you may refer to Section 3, Preliminary in this paper.