Transfer learning involves taking information and insight from one problem domain and applying it to a new problem domain. Although widely used in practice, theory for transfer learning remains less well-developed. To address this, we prove several novel results related to transfer learning, showing the need to carefully select which sets of information to transfer and the need for dependence between transferred information and target problems. Furthermore, we prove how the degree of probabilistic change in an algorithm using transfer learning places an upper bound on the amount of improvement possible. These results build on the algorithmic search framework for machine learning, allowing the results to apply to a wide range of learning problems using transfer.
@article{arxiv.2006.12694,
title = {Limits of Transfer Learning},
author = {Jake Williams and Abel Tadesse and Tyler Sam and Huey Sun and George D. Montanez},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.12694},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Accepted for presentation at the Sixth International Conference on Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science (LOD 2020), July 19-23, 2020