Machine Learning (ML) has revolutionized various domains, offering predictive capabilities in several areas. However, with the increasing accessibility of ML tools, many practitioners, lacking deep ML expertise, adopt a "push the button" approach, utilizing user-friendly interfaces without a thorough understanding of underlying algorithms. While this approach provides convenience, it raises concerns about the reliability of outcomes, leading to challenges such as incorrect performance evaluation. This paper addresses a critical issue in ML, known as data leakage, where unintended information contaminates the training data, impacting model performance evaluation. Users, due to a lack of understanding, may inadvertently overlook crucial steps, leading to optimistic performance estimates that may not hold in real-world scenarios. The discrepancy between evaluated and actual performance on new data is a significant concern. In particular, this paper categorizes data leakage in ML, discussing how certain conditions can propagate through the ML workflow. Furthermore, it explores the connection between data leakage and the specific task being addressed, investigates its occurrence in Transfer Learning, and compares standard inductive ML with transductive ML frameworks. The conclusion summarizes key findings, emphasizing the importance of addressing data leakage for robust and reliable ML applications.

When we transfer a pretrained language model to a new language, there are many axes of variation that change at once. To disentangle the impact of different factors like syntactic similarity and vocabulary similarity, we propose a set of controlled transfer studies: we systematically transform the language of the GLUE benchmark, altering one axis of crosslingual variation at a time, and then measure the resulting drops in a pretrained model's downstream performance. We find that models can largely recover from syntactic-style shifts, but cannot recover from vocabulary misalignment and embedding matrix re-initialization, even with continued pretraining on 15 million tokens. %On the other hand, transferring to a dataset with an unaligned vocabulary is extremely hard to recover from in the low-data regime. Moreover, good-quality tokenizers in the transfer language do not make vocabulary alignment easier. Our experiments provide insights into the factors of cross-lingual transfer that researchers should most focus on when designing language transfer scenarios.

Transfer learning for nonparametric regression is considered. We first study the non-asymptotic minimax risk for this problem and develop a novel estimator called the confidence thresholding estimator, which is shown to achieve the minimax optimal risk up to a logarithmic factor. Our results demonstrate two unique phenomena in transfer learning: auto-smoothing and super-acceleration, which differentiate it from nonparametric regression in a traditional setting. We then propose a data-driven algorithm that adaptively achieves the minimax risk up to a logarithmic factor across a wide range of parameter spaces. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the numerical performance of the adaptive transfer learning algorithm, and a real-world example is provided to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method.

While structure learning achieves remarkable performance in high-resource languages, the situation differs for under-represented languages due to the scarcity of annotated data. This study focuses on assessing the efficacy of transfer learning in enhancing dependency parsing for Javanese, a language spoken by 80 million individuals but characterized by limited representation in natural language processing. We utilized the Universal Dependencies dataset consisting of dependency treebanks from more than 100 languages, including Javanese. We propose two learning strategies to train the model: transfer learning (TL) and hierarchical transfer learning (HTL). While TL only uses a source language to pre-train the model, the HTL method uses a source language and an intermediate language in the learning process. The results show that our best model uses the HTL method, which improves performance with an increase of 10% for both UAS and LAS evaluations compared to the baseline model.

Interatomic potentials learned using machine learning methods have been successfully applied to atomistic simulations. However, accurate models require large training datasets, while generating reference calculations is computationally demanding. To bypass this difficulty, we propose a transfer learning algorithm that leverages the ability of graph neural networks (GNNs) to represent chemical environments together with kernel mean embeddings. We extract a feature map from GNNs pre-trained on the OC20 dataset and use it to learn the potential energy surface from system-specific datasets of catalytic processes. Our method is further enhanced by incorporating into the kernel the chemical species information, resulting in improved performance and interpretability. We test our approach on a series of realistic datasets of increasing complexity, showing excellent generalization and transferability performance, and improving on methods that rely on GNNs or ridge regression alone, as well as similar fine-tuning approaches.

Sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) has been an active research area, owing to its applications in smart environments, assisted living, fitness, healthcare, etc. Recently, deep learning based end-to-end training has resulted in state-of-the-art performance in domains such as computer vision and natural language, where large amounts of annotated data are available. However, large quantities of annotated data are not available for sensor-based HAR. Moreover, the real-world settings on which the HAR is performed differ in terms of sensor modalities, classification tasks, and target users. To address this problem, transfer learning has been employed extensively. In this survey, we focus on these transfer learning methods in the application domains of smart home and wearables-based HAR. In particular, we provide a problem-solution perspective by categorizing and presenting the works in terms of their contributions and the challenges they address. We also present an updated view of the state-of-the-art for both application domains. Based on our analysis of 205 papers, we highlight the gaps in the literature and provide a roadmap for addressing them. This survey provides a reference to the HAR community, by summarizing the existing works and providing a promising research agenda.

The growing prevalence and rapid evolution of offensive language in social media amplify the complexities of detection, particularly highlighting the challenges in identifying such content across diverse languages. This survey presents a systematic and comprehensive exploration of Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning (CLTL) techniques in offensive language detection in social media. Our study stands as the first holistic overview to focus exclusively on the cross-lingual scenario in this domain. We analyse 67 relevant papers and categorise these studies across various dimensions, including the characteristics of multilingual datasets used, the cross-lingual resources employed, and the specific CLTL strategies implemented. According to "what to transfer", we also summarise three main CLTL transfer approaches: instance, feature, and parameter transfer. Additionally, we shed light on the current challenges and future research opportunities in this field. Furthermore, we have made our survey resources available online, including two comprehensive tables that provide accessible references to the multilingual datasets and CLTL methods used in the reviewed literature.

Cognitive load classification is the task of automatically determining an individual's utilization of working memory resources during performance of a task based on physiologic measures such as electroencephalography (EEG). In this paper, we follow a cross-disciplinary approach, where tools and methodologies from speech processing are used to tackle this problem. The corpus we use was released publicly in 2021 as part of the first passive brain-computer interface competition on cross-session workload estimation. We present our approach which used i-vector-based neural network classifiers to accomplish inter-subject cross-session EEG transfer learning, achieving 18% relative improvement over equivalent subject-dependent models. We also report experiments showing how our subject-independent models perform competitively on held-out subjects and improve with additional subject data, suggesting that subject-dependent training is not required for effective cognitive load determination.

Raman spectroscopy, a photonic modality based on the inelastic backscattering of coherent light, is a valuable asset to the intraoperative sensing space, offering non-ionizing potential and highly-specific molecular fingerprint-like spectroscopic signatures that can be used for diagnosis of pathological tissue in the dynamic surgical field. Though Raman suffers from weakness in intensity, Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS), which uses metal nanostructures to amplify Raman signals, can achieve detection sensitivities that rival traditional photonic modalities. In this study, we outline a robotic Raman system that can reliably pinpoint the location and boundaries of a tumor embedded in healthy tissue, modeled here as a tissue-mimicking phantom with selectively infused Gold Nanostar regions. Further, due to the relative dearth of collected biological SERS or Raman data, we implement transfer learning to achieve 100% validation classification accuracy for Gold Nanostars compared to Control Agarose, thus providing a proof-of-concept for Raman-based deep learning training pipelines. We reconstruct a surgical field of 30x60mm in 10.2 minutes, and achieve 98.2% accuracy, preserving relative measurements between features in the phantom. We also achieve an 84.3% Intersection-over-Union score, which is the extent of overlap between the ground truth and predicted reconstructions. Lastly, we also demonstrate that the Raman system and classification algorithm do not discern based on sample color, but instead on presence of SERS agents. This study provides a crucial step in the translation of intelligent Raman systems in intraoperative oncological spaces.

ABSTRACT Considering data insufficiency in metal additive manufacturing (AM), transfer learning (TL) has been adopted to extract knowledge from source domains (e.g., completed printings) to improve the modeling performance in target domains (e.g., new printings). Current applications use all accessible source data directly in TL with no regard to the similarity between source and target data. This paper proposes a systematic method to find appropriate subsets of source data based on similarities between the source and target datasets for a given set of limited target domain data. Such similarity is characterized by the spatial and model distance metrics. A Pareto frontier-based source data selection method is developed, where the source data located on the Pareto frontier defined by two similarity distance metrics are selected iteratively. The method is integrated into an instance-based TL method (decision tree regression model) and a model-based TL method (fine-tuned artificial neural network). Both models are then tested on several regression tasks in metal AM. Comparison results demonstrate that 1) the source data selection method is general and supports integration with various TL methods and distance metrics, 2) compared with using all source data, the proposed method can find a small subset of source data from the same domain with better TL performance in metal AM regression tasks involving different processes and machines, and 3) when multiple source domains exist, the source data selection method could find the subset from one source domain to obtain comparable or better TL performance than the model constructed using data from all source domains. Keywords: metal additive manufacturing, transfer learning, source data selection, Pareto frontier 1 Introduction Metal additive manufacturing (AM) fabricates parts by depositing metal materials layer by layer with various heat sources, e.g., the laser beam and electric arc. Although metal AM has been adopted in electronics (Pang et al. 2020), automotive (Vasco 2021), aerospace (Blakey-Milner et al. 2021), and other industries, low productivity and unstable quality are two drawbacks that restrict the applications of metal AM. To alleviate the two drawbacks, constructing data-driven models to reveal correlations among processes, structures, and properties has attracted attention in both industry and academia. These models are built based on collected data from experiments or simulations and adopted for process optimization, control, or monitoring to improve the quality of printed parts.