The paper analyzes phase transitions in transfer learning for perceptrons.
problem Understanding when transfer learning from a source task to a target task is beneficial.
method Theoretical analysis of a pair of related perceptron learning tasks.
result Reveals a phase transition from negative to positive transfer as task similarity changes.
Defines related tasks for transfer learning using foliations.
problem Lack of a foundational description of related tasks in transfer learning.
method Introduces foliations as a mathematical framework for relatedness between tasks.
result Identifies foliations as a way to represent relatedness in transfer learning.
Double descent in transfer learning explained for linear regression problems.
problem Understanding generalization errors in transferring parameters between overparameterized linear regression tasks.
method Analytical characterization of generalization error in terms of transfer learning factors.
result Generalization error follows a two-dimensional double descent trend controlled by transfer learning factors.
This work transfers causal knowledge between tasks for Individual Treatment Effect estimation.
problem Estimating Individual Treatment Effects (ITE) requires a large amount of data, making it challenging.
method The authors introduce a practical framework for efficient transfer of causal knowledge between tasks, using a Causal Inference Task Affinity (CITA) measure.
result ITE knowledge transfer can significantly reduce the amount of data needed for ITE estimation.
New algorithms improve multi-task bandit performance by transferring reward samples.
problem Sequential multi-task bandit problems with adjacent similar tasks.
method Two UCB-based algorithms that transfer reward samples between tasks.
result Transfer of reward samples reduces overall regret compared to no transfer.
We propose a novel approach for estimating the difficulty and transferability of supervised classification tasks. Unlike previous work, our approach is solution agnostic and does not require or assume trained models. Instead, we estimate these values using an information theoretic approach: treating training labels as …
Anti-transfer learning prevents misleading representations for speech tasks.
problem Misleading representations learned from orthogonal tasks in speech processing.
method Penalizes similarity between activations of a network and another trained on an orthogonal task.
result Improves classification accuracy and invariance to the orthogonal task.
Robot learns multiple tasks hierarchically by transferring knowledge.
problem Learning multiple complex tasks in open-ended environments.
method Task-oriented procedures, goal-babbling, imitation learning, active learning, intrinsic motivation.
result Robots can learn complex tasks more efficiently by transferring knowledge from simpler ones.
This paper tackles negative transfer in multi-task learning by introducing class-wise weights.
problem Negative transfer hampers function from achieving optimality in multi-task learning.
method Introduces class-wise weights to drive positive transfer and suppress negative transfer.
result Demonstrates improved performance in multi-task learning by reducing negative transfer.
Transfer learning does not improve character recognition performance.
problem Improving character recognition performance using transfer learning.
method Performed experiments with varying levels of similarity between source and target tasks, transferring both parameters and features.
result No significant advantage gained by transfer learning over traditional machine learning.
Develops a method for manifold learning with small sample size datasets.
problem Improving manifold learning performance for multiple tasks with limited samples.
method Uses instance and model transfer to integrate manifold models from similar tasks.
result Successfully estimates manifolds with tiny sample sizes across multiple tasks.
We observe standard transfer learning can improve prediction accuracies of target tasks at the cost of lowering their prediction fairness -- a phenomenon we named discriminatory transfer. We examine prediction fairness of a standard hypothesis transfer algorithm and a standard multi-task learning algorithm, and show th…
New unsupervised transfer learning method for spatiotemporal tasks.
problem Transfer knowledge from unsupervised models to new predictive tasks.
method Differentiable framework with Transferable Memory Unit (TMU).
result Significant improvements on spatiotemporal prediction benchmarks.
Many tasks in natural language understanding require learning relationships between two sequences for various tasks such as natural language inference, paraphrasing and entailment. These aforementioned tasks are similar in nature, yet they are often modeled individually. Knowledge transfer can be effective for closely …
We reduce the computational cost of Neural AutoML with transfer learning. AutoML relieves human effort by automating the design of ML algorithms. Neural AutoML has become popular for the design of deep learning architectures, however, this method has a high computation cost. To address this we propose Transfer Neural A…
Learning from prior tasks and transferring that experience to improve future performance is critical for building lifelong learning agents. Although results in supervised and reinforcement learning show that transfer may significantly improve the learning performance, most of the literature on transfer is focused on ba…
A simple approach improves performance on both past and future tasks in lifelong learning.
problem Forgetting in lifelong learning, where performance on past tasks degrades when learning new tasks.
method Representation ensembling to improve performance on both future and past tasks.
result Representation ensembling demonstrates both forward and backward transfer across various datasets.
Improved transfer learning with expert models, reducing compute and speeding up performance.
problem Improving sample efficiency and reducing computational requirements for new tasks.
method Training a diverse set of experts using existing label structures and performance proxies to select the relevant expert for each target task.
result Significant speed-up of 2-3 orders of magnitude compared to competing approaches.
Paper tackles robust knowledge transfer in parallel RL tasks.
problem Transfer knowledge from low-tier to high-tier tasks in parallel RL without shared dynamics or reward functions.
method Identifies Optimal Value Dominance condition and proposes online learning algorithms for both tasks.
result Achieves constant regret on partial states and near-optimal regret when tasks are dissimilar.
Q-learning is one of the most popular methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Transfer Learning aims to utilize the learned knowledge from source tasks to help new tasks to improve the sample complexity of the new tasks. Considering that data collection in RL is both more time and cost consuming and Q-learning converge…
Paper analyzes transfer risk in transfer learning for finance.
problem Evaluate transferability of transfer learning in finance.
method Proposes transfer risk concept and applies to stock return prediction and portfolio optimization.
result Transfer risk correlates with transfer learning performance and identifies appropriate source tasks.
Modern deep transfer learning approaches have mainly focused on learning generic feature vectors from one task that are transferable to other tasks, such as word embeddings in language and pretrained convolutional features in vision. However, these approaches usually transfer unary features and largely ignore more stru…
Method selects task-specific neurons for unsupervised transfer learning.
problem Challenges in fine-tuning large language models for specific tasks.
method Selects important neurons for a specific classification task and extends to multi-source transfer learning.
result Higher similarity between task-specific fingerprints leads to better transferability.
PAC-Net prunes deep models for better transfer learning.
problem Improving transfer learning with over-parameterized models.
method Prune, Allocate, Calibrate (PAC) approach.
result PAC-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance in inductive transfer learning.
Training a source model optimally for its own task is suboptimal for downstream transfer.
problem The optimality of a source model for its own task hinders downstream transfer performance.
method Analyzes L2-SP ridge regression, characterizes transfer-optimal source penalty, and identifies alignment-dependent effects.
result Transfer benefits from stronger source regularization when aligned imperfectly, and from weaker regularization when aligned perfectly.
New insights into continual learning with task similarity.
problem Challenges in learning similar tasks without interference.
method Linear teacher-student model with latent structure.
result High input feature similarity with low readout similarity is catastrophic.
Study on neural networks' performance in sequential task learning.
problem Understanding the performance of neural networks in sequential task learning.
method Theoretical analysis of generalization performance in continual learning using statistical mechanical analysis of kernel ridge-less regression.
result Characteristic transitions from positive to negative transfer observed in neural networks.
Enhances generative model accuracy through knowledge transfer.
problem Improving generative model precision across different tasks.
method Introduces a novel framework for transfer learning using shared structures.
result Demonstrates enhanced performance in diffusion and normalizing flows models.
New attention mechanism improves meta-transfer learning in dynamic tasks.
problem Underfitting in meta-transfer learning with dynamic tasks.
method Proposed Recurrent Memory Reconstruction (RMR) attention mechanism.
result ASNP-RMR significantly outperforms baselines in various tasks.
Simple methods improve regression transferability estimation.
problem Estimating how well regression models transfer between tasks.
method Two simple, computationally efficient approaches based on negative regularized mean squared error.
result Significantly outperform existing methods in accuracy and efficiency.
New theory explains when pre-trained models can improve downstream tasks.
problem Lack of theoretical understanding of task similarity for transfer learning.
method Feature-centric viewpoint, theoretical results on transferability phase diagram.
result Transfer learning outperforms training from scratch when target task is well represented in feature space.
Sharing knowledge between tasks is vital for efficient learning in a multi-task setting. However, most research so far has focused on the easier case where knowledge transfer is not harmful, i.e., where knowledge from one task cannot negatively impact the performance on another task. In contrast, we present an approach…
In complex transfer learning scenarios new tasks might not be tightly linked to previous tasks. Approaches that transfer information contained only in the final parameters of a source model will therefore struggle. Instead, transfer learning at a higher level of abstraction is needed. We propose Leap, a framework that …
New method transfers emotions in facial images.
problem Transforming facial images to different emotions.
method Infinite task learning and vector-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces.
result Achieves low reconstruction cost and high emotion classification accuracy.
Transferring knowledge across a sequence of reinforcement-learning tasks is challenging, and has a number of important applications. Though there is encouraging empirical evidence that transfer can improve performance in subsequent reinforcement-learning tasks, there has been very little theoretical analysis. In this p…
Proposes TFCL to mitigate negative transfer in MTL by collaborating across features and tasks.
problem Negative transfer in Multi-Task Learning (MTL) due to dissimilar tasks.
method Task-Feature Collaborative Learning (TFCL) with heterogeneous block-diagonal structure regularizer and optimization method.
result Global convergence and block-diagonal structure recovery guarantees.
Novel model improves clinical risk prediction by transferring knowledge between tasks over time.
problem Negative transfer in multi-task learning for clinical risk prediction.
method Temporal Probabilistic Asymmetric Multi-Task Learning (TPAMTL).
result Significantly outperforms various deep learning models for time-series prediction.
USFs capture dynamics for faster RL task transfer.
problem Applying knowledge from one task to another.
method Proposed Universal Successor Features (USFs) for RL.
result USFs accelerate training and transfer knowledge.
Adversarially robust models transfer better than standard models in image classification.
problem Improving transfer learning performance in image classification.
method Focused on adversarially robust ImageNet classifiers, compared to standard models.
result Adversarially robust models yield improved accuracy on downstream classification tasks.
Study improves GMM learning performance through multi-task and transfer learning.
problem Improving GMM learning performance through similar task structures.
method Proposes a multi-task GMM learning procedure based on EM algorithm, robust to outliers.
result Achieves minimax optimal rate of convergence for parameter estimation and mis-clustering.
PTF accelerates RL by reusing source policies without measuring task similarity.
problem Leveraging prior knowledge for faster RL.
method Adaptive Policy Transfer Framework (PTF) for RL.
result Significantly accelerates RL learning process and surpasses state-of-the-art methods.
The objective of transfer reinforcement learning is to generalize from a set of previous tasks to unseen new tasks. In this work, we focus on the transfer scenario where the dynamics among tasks are the same, but their goals differ. Although general value function (Sutton et al., 2011) has been shown to be useful for k…
Learning with label proportions (LLP), which is a learning task that only provides unlabeled data in bags and each bag's label proportion, has widespread successful applications in practice. However, most of the existing LLP methods don't consider the knowledge transfer for uncertain data. This paper presents a transfe…
Brain imaging data are important in brain sciences yet expensive to obtain, with big volume (i.e., large p) but small sample size (i.e., small n). To tackle this problem, transfer learning is a promising direction that leverages source data to improve performance on related, target data. Most transfer learning methods …
Method transfers knowledge without label overlap, source data, or target architecture consistency.
problem Difficulties in transfer learning due to label mismatch, restricted source data, and specialized target architectures.
method Uses deep generative models in two stages: pseudo pre-training and pseudo semi-supervised learning.
result Outperforms scratch training and knowledge distillation methods.
Enhances performance on downstream tasks using multi-domain data.
problem Improving performance on tasks with limited downstream data.
method Deep transfer learning framework leveraging shared and domain-specific features.
result Significantly improves convergence rate for learning Lipschitz functions.
UBM transfers bias mitigation from upstream to downstream tasks efficiently.
problem Bias in fine-tuned language models across various tasks.
method Apply bias mitigation to an upstream model, then fine-tune a downstream model on this mitigated model.
result UBM effects transfer to new downstream tasks, creating less biased models.
Optimal transport metric transfers deep network representations efficiently.
problem Efficiently transfer deep network representations for new tasks.
method Use optimal transport to quantify representation similarity and regularize student network.
result Optimal transport distance promotes similarity between teacher and student representations.