Transfer learning (TL) has been widely used in motor imagery (MI) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to reduce the calibration effort for a new subject, and demonstrated promising performance. After electroencephalogram (EEG) signal acquisition, a closed-loop MI-based BCI system also includes signal processing, feature engineering, and classification blocks before sending out the control signal to an external device, whereas previous approaches only considered TL in one or two such components. This paper proposes that TL could be considered in all three components (signal processing, feature engineering, and classification) of MI-based BCIs. Furthermore, it is also very important to specifically add a data alignment component before signal processing to make the data from different subjects more consistent, and hence to facilitate subsequential TL. Offline calibration experiments on two MI datasets verified our proposal. Especially, integrating data alignment and sophisticated TL approaches can significantly improve the classification performance, and hence greatly reduce the calibration effort.

The success of machine learning algorithms often relies on a large amount of high-quality data to train well-performed models. However, data is a valuable resource and are always held by different parties in reality. An effective solution to such a "data isolation" problem is to employ federated learning, which allows multiple parties to collaboratively train a model. In this paper, we propose a Secure version of the widely used Maximum Mean Discrepancy (SMMD) based on homomorphic encryption to enable effective knowledge transfer under the data federation setting without compromising the data privacy. The proposed SMMD is able to avoid the potential information leakage in transfer learning when aligning the source and target data distribution. As a result, both the source domain and target domain can fully utilize their data to build Figure 1: Illustration of secure transfer learning more scalable models. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SMMD is secure and effective. Facebook's massive user data leakage event caused strong repercussions.

Transfer of pre-trained representations can improve sample efficiency and reduce computational requirements for new tasks. However, representations used for transfer are usually generic, and are not tailored to a particular distribution of downstream tasks. We explore the use of expert representations for transfer with a simple, yet effective, strategy. We train a diverse set of experts by exploiting existing label structures, and use cheap-to-compute performance proxies to select the relevant expert for each target task. This strategy scales the process of transferring to new tasks, since it does not revisit the pre-training data during transfer. Accordingly, it requires little extra compute per target task, and results in a speed-up of 2-3 orders of magnitude compared to competing approaches. Further, we provide an adapter-based architecture able to compress many experts into a single model. We evaluate our approach on two different data sources and demonstrate that it outperforms baselines on over 20 diverse vision tasks in both cases.

We study and quantify the generalization patterns of multitask learning (MTL) models for sequence labeling tasks. MTL models are trained to optimize a set of related tasks jointly. Although multitask learning has achieved improved performance in some problems, there are also tasks that lose performance when trained together. These mixed results motivate us to study the factors that impact the performance of MTL models. We note that theoretical bounds and convergence rates for MTL models exist, but they rely on strong assumptions such as task relatedness and the use of balanced datasets. To remedy these limitations, we propose the creation of a task simulator and the use of Symbolic Regression to learn expressions relating model performance to possible factors of influence. For MTL, we study the model performance against the number of tasks (T), the number of samples per task (n) and the task relatedness measured by the adjusted mutual information (AMI). In our experiments, we could empirically find formulas relating model performance with factors of sqrt(n), sqrt(T), which are equivalent to sound mathematical proofs in Maurer[2016], and we went beyond by discovering that performance relates to a factor of sqrt(AMI).

In this paper, we propose Minimalist Transfer Learning (MinTL) to simplify the system design process of task-oriented dialogue systems and alleviate the over-dependency on annotated data. MinTL is a simple yet effective transfer learning framework, which allows us to plug-and-play pre-trained seq2seq models, and jointly learn dialogue state tracking and dialogue response generation. Unlike previous approaches, which use a copy mechanism to "carryover" the old dialogue states to the new one, we introduce Levenshtein belief spans (Lev), that allows efficient dialogue state tracking with a minimal generation length. We instantiate our learning framework with two pre-trained backbones: T5 and BART, and evaluate them on MultiWOZ. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: 1) our systems establish new state-of-the-art results on end-to-end response generation, 2) MinTL-based systems are more robust than baseline methods in the low resource setting, and they achieve competitive results with only 20\% training data, and 3) Lev greatly improves the inference efficiency.

This paper explores a new research problem of unsupervised transfer learning across multiple spatiotemporal prediction tasks. Unlike most existing transfer learning methods that focus on fixing the discrepancy between supervised tasks, we study how to transfer knowledge from a zoo of unsupervisedly learned models towards another predictive network. Our motivation is that models from different sources are expected to understand the complex spatiotemporal dynamics from different perspectives, thereby effectively supplementing the new task, even if the task has sufficient training samples. Technically, we propose a differentiable framework named transferable memory. It adaptively distills knowledge from a bank of memory states of multiple pretrained RNNs, and applies it to the target network via a novel recurrent structure called the Transferable Memory Unit (TMU). Compared with finetuning, our approach yields significant improvements on three benchmarks for spatiotemporal prediction, and benefits the target task even from less relevant pretext ones.

This paper surveys the field of transfer learning in the problem setting of Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL has been the key solution to sequential decision-making problems. Along with the fast advance of RL in various domains. including robotics and game-playing, transfer learning arises as an important technique to assist RL by leveraging and transferring external expertise to boost the learning process. In this survey, we review the central issues of transfer learning in the RL domain, providing a systematic categorization of its state-of-the-art techniques. We analyze their goals, methodologies, applications, and the RL frameworks under which these transfer learning techniques would be approachable. We discuss the relationship between transfer learning and other relevant topics from an RL perspective and also explore the potential challenges as well as future development directions for transfer learning in RL.

While being deployed in many critical applications as core components, machine learning (ML) models are vulnerable to various security and privacy attacks. One major privacy attack in this domain is membership inference, where an adversary aims to determine whether a target data sample is part of the training set of a target ML model. So far, most of the current membership inference attacks are evaluated against ML models trained from scratch. However, real-world ML models are typically trained following the transfer learning paradigm, where a model owner takes a pretrained model learned from a different dataset, namely teacher model, and trains her own student model by fine-tuning the teacher model with her own data. In this paper, we perform the first systematic evaluation of membership inference attacks against transfer learning models. We adopt the strategy of shadow model training to derive the data for training our membership inference classifier. Extensive experiments on four real-world image datasets show that membership inference can achieve effective performance. For instance, on the CIFAR100 classifier transferred from ResNet20 (pretrained with Caltech101), our membership inference achieves $95\%$ attack AUC. Moreover, we show that membership inference is still effective when the architecture of target model is unknown. Our results shed light on the severity of membership risks stemming from machine learning models in practice.

This line of code is used to define the transformations that the training DataGenerator will apply on all the images to augment the size of the dataset. For the validation DataGenerator, we only specify the scaling factor. The other transformations are not required because we are not training the model on this data. Next, we define the Model. We set layer.trainable False for each layer of the VGG model, as we are using the pre-trained weights of the model.

We introduce transfer learning for nonlinear dynamics, which enables efficient predictions of chaotic dynamics by utilizing a small amount of data. For the Lorenz chaos, by optimizing the transfer rate, we accomplish more accurate inference than the conventional method by an order of magnitude. Moreover, a surprisingly small amount of learning is enough to infer the energy dissipation rate of the Navier-Stokes turbulence because we can, thanks to the small-scale universality of turbulence, transfer a large amount of the knowledge learned from turbulence data at lower Reynolds number.