We propose Neural Priming, a technique for adapting large pretrained models to distribution shifts and downstream tasks given few or no labeled examples. Presented with class names or unlabeled test samples, Neural Priming enables the model to recall and conditions its parameters on relevant data seen throughout pretraining, thereby priming it for the test distribution. Neural Priming can be performed at test time, even for pretraining datasets as large as LAION-2B. Performing lightweight updates on the recalled data significantly improves accuracy across a variety of distribution shift and transfer learning benchmarks. Concretely, in the zero-shot setting, we see a 2.45% improvement in accuracy on ImageNet and 3.81% accuracy improvement on average across standard transfer learning benchmarks. Further, using Neural Priming at inference to adapt to distribution shift, we see a 1.41% accuracy improvement on ImageNetV2. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Neural Priming in addressing the challenge of limited labeled data and changing distributions. Code is available at github.com/RAIVNLab/neural-priming.

The objective of this study is to evaluate whether the number of requisite training samples can be reduced with the use of various transfer learning models for predicting, for example, the chemical source terms of the data-driven reduced-order model that represents the homogeneous ignition process of a hydrogen/air mixture. Principal component analysis is applied to reduce the dimensionality of the hydrogen/air mixture in composition space. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are used to tabulate the reaction rates of principal components, and subsequently, a system of ordinary differential equations is solved. As the number of training samples decreases at the target task (i.e.,for T0 > 1000 K and various phi), the reduced-order model fails to predict the ignition evolution of a hydrogen/air mixture. Three transfer learning strategies are then applied to the training of the ANN model with a sparse dataset. The performance of the reduced-order model with a sparse dataset is found to be remarkably enhanced if the training of the ANN model is restricted by a regularization term that controls the degree of knowledge transfer from source to target tasks. To this end, a novel transfer learning method is introduced, parameter control via partial initialization and regularization (PaPIR), whereby the amount of knowledge transferred is systemically adjusted for the initialization and regularization of the ANN model in the target task. It is found that an additional performance gain can be achieved by changing the initialization scheme of the ANN model in the target task when the task similarity between source and target tasks is relatively low.

We propose a novel benchmark for cross-view knowledge transfer of dense video captioning, adapting models from web instructional videos with exocentric views to an egocentric view. While dense video captioning (predicting time segments and their captions) is primarily studied with exocentric videos (e.g., YouCook2), benchmarks with egocentric videos are restricted due to data scarcity. To overcome the limited video availability, transferring knowledge from abundant exocentric web videos is demanded as a practical approach. However, learning the correspondence between exocentric and egocentric views is difficult due to their dynamic view changes. The web videos contain mixed views focusing on either human body actions or close-up hand-object interactions, while the egocentric view is constantly shifting as the camera wearer moves. This necessitates the in-depth study of cross-view transfer under complex view changes. In this work, we first create a real-life egocentric dataset (EgoYC2) whose captions are shared with YouCook2, enabling transfer learning between these datasets assuming their ground-truth is accessible. To bridge the view gaps, we propose a view-invariant learning method using adversarial training in both the pre-training and fine-tuning stages. While the pre-training is designed to learn invariant features against the mixed views in the web videos, the view-invariant fine-tuning further mitigates the view gaps between both datasets. We validate our proposed method by studying how effectively it overcomes the view change problem and efficiently transfers the knowledge to the egocentric domain. Our benchmark pushes the study of the cross-view transfer into a new task domain of dense video captioning and will envision methodologies to describe egocentric videos in natural language.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have significantly bolstered the technological world. This paper explores the potential of transfer learning in natural language processing focusing mainly on sentiment analysis. The models trained on the big data can also be used where data are scarce. The claim is that, compared to training models from scratch, transfer learning, using pre-trained BERT models, can increase sentiment classification accuracy. The study adopts a sophisticated experimental design that uses the IMDb dataset of sentimentally labelled movie reviews. Pre-processing includes tokenization and encoding of text data, making it suitable for NLP models. The dataset is used on a BERT based model, measuring its performance using accuracy. The result comes out to be 100 per cent accurate. Although the complete accuracy could appear impressive, it might be the result of overfitting or a lack of generalization. Further analysis is required to ensure the model's ability to handle diverse and unseen data. The findings underscore the effectiveness of transfer learning in NLP, showcasing its potential to excel in sentiment analysis tasks. However, the research calls for a cautious interpretation of perfect accuracy and emphasizes the need for additional measures to validate the model's generalization.

The recent development of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technologies has spurred investigations to optimize dense urban traffic. This paper considers advisory autonomy, in which real-time driving advisories are issued to drivers, thus blending the CAV and the human driver. Due to the complexity of traffic systems, recent studies of coordinating CAVs have resorted to leveraging deep reinforcement learning (RL). Advisory autonomy is formalized as zero-order holds, and we consider a range of hold duration from 0.1 to 40 seconds. However, despite the similarity of the higher frequency tasks on CAVs, a direct application of deep RL fails to be generalized to advisory autonomy tasks. We introduce Temporal Transfer Learning (TTL) algorithms to select source tasks, systematically leveraging the temporal structure to solve the full range of tasks. TTL selects the most suitable source tasks to maximize the performance of the range of tasks. We validate our algorithms on diverse mixed-traffic scenarios, demonstrating that TTL more reliably solves the tasks than baselines. This paper underscores the potential of coarse-grained advisory autonomy with TTL in traffic flow optimization.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have demonstrated remarkable applicability across a variety of downstream tasks, including zero-shot image classification. Recently, the use of prompts or adapters for efficient transfer learning has gained significant attention for effectively adapting to downstream tasks. However, the roles of vision and text prompts, as well as adapters in terms of generalization and transfer difficulty, have been overlooked, limiting performance on unseen tasks. In this paper, we empirically analyze how VLMs behave when using vision and text prompts, adapters, and a combination of these components, marking a novel exploration by our study. Our observations find that utilizing vision prompts for class separability and text adapters for task adaptation is crucial for adaptability and generalizability. Moreover, to improve generalization across every domain, we propose an adaptive ensemble method that effectively combines the general knowledge of VLMs with task-specific knowledge according to transfer difficulty. Upon experimenting with extensive benchmarks, our method consistently outperforms all baselines, particularly on unseen tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the world. Diagnosing cancer early on can save many lives. Pathologists have to look at tissue microarray (TMA) images manually to identify tumors, which can be time-consuming, inconsistent and subjective. Existing automatic algorithms either have not achieved the accuracy level of a pathologist or require substantial human involvements. A major challenge is that TMA images with different shapes, sizes, and locations can have the same score. Learning staining patterns in TMA images requires a huge number of images, which are severely limited due to privacy and regulation concerns in medical organizations. TMA images from different cancer types may share certain common characteristics, but combining them directly harms the accuracy due to heterogeneity in their staining patterns. Transfer learning is an emerging learning paradigm that allows borrowing strength from similar problems. However, existing approaches typically require a large sample from similar learning problems, while TMA images of different cancer types are often available in small sample size and further existing algorithms are limited to transfer learning from one similar problem. We propose a new transfer learning algorithm that could learn from multiple related problems, where each problem has a small sample and can have a substantially different distribution from the original one. The proposed algorithm has made it possible to break the critical accuracy barrier (the 75% accuracy level of pathologists), with a reported accuracy of 75.9% on breast cancer TMA images from the Stanford Tissue Microarray Database. It is supported by recent developments in transfer learning theory and empirical evidence in clustering technology. This will allow pathologists to confidently adopt automatic algorithms in recognizing tumors consistently with a higher accuracy in real time.

Traditional surveillance systems rely on human attention, limiting their effectiveness. This study employs convolutional neural networks and transfer learning to develop a real-time computer vision system for automatic handgun detection. Comprehensive analysis of online handgun detection methods is conducted, emphasizing reducing false positives and learning time. Transfer learning is demonstrated as an effective approach. Despite technical challenges, the proposed system achieves a precision rate of 84.74%, demonstrating promising performance comparable to related works, enabling faster learning and accurate automatic handgun detection for enhanced security. This research advances security measures by reducing human monitoring dependence, showcasing the potential of transfer learning-based approaches for efficient and reliable handgun detection.

We introduce Adapters, an open-source library that unifies parameter-efficient and modular transfer learning in large language models. By integrating 10 diverse adapter methods into a unified interface, Adapters offers ease of use and flexible configuration. Our library allows researchers and practitioners to leverage adapter modularity through composition blocks, enabling the design of complex adapter setups. We demonstrate the library's efficacy by evaluating its performance against full fine-tuning on various NLP tasks. Adapters provides a powerful tool for addressing the challenges of conventional fine-tuning paradigms and promoting more efficient and modular transfer learning. The library is available via https://adapterhub.ml/adapters.

Massive data is often considered essential for deep learning applications, but it also incurs significant computational and infrastructural costs. Therefore, dataset pruning (DP) has emerged as an effective way to improve data efficiency by identifying and removing redundant training samples without sacrificing performance. In this work, we aim to address the problem of DP for transfer learning, i.e., how to prune a source dataset for improved pretraining efficiency and lossless finetuning accuracy on downstream target tasks. To our best knowledge, the problem of DP for transfer learning remains open, as previous studies have primarily addressed DP and transfer learning as separate problems. By contrast, we establish a unified viewpoint to integrate DP with transfer learning and find that existing DP methods are not suitable for the transfer learning paradigm. We then propose two new DP methods, label mapping and feature mapping, for supervised and self-supervised pretraining settings respectively, by revisiting the DP problem through the lens of source-target domain mapping. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on numerous transfer learning tasks. We show that source data classes can be pruned by up to 40% ~ 80% without sacrificing downstream performance, resulting in a significant 2 ~ 5 times speed-up during the pretraining stage. Besides, our proposal exhibits broad applicability and can improve other computationally intensive transfer learning techniques, such as adversarial pretraining. Codes are available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/DP4TL.