Lempitsky, 2016) is most robust.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

It is also prohibitively expensive to learn a new policy from scratch for each robot hardware due to the high sample complexity of modern state-of-the-art algorithms.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 99.9% of U.S. businesses yet remain systematically excluded from AI due to a mismatch between their operational scale and modern machine learning's data requirements. This paper introduces SmallML, a Bayesian transfer learning framework achieving enterprise-level prediction accuracy with datasets as small as 50-200 observations. We develop a three-layer architecture integrating transfer learning, hierarchical Bayesian modeling, and conformal prediction. Layer 1 extracts informative priors from 22,673 public records using a SHAP-based procedure transferring knowledge from gradient boosting to logistic regression. Layer 2 implements hierarchical pooling across J=5-50 SMEs with adaptive shrinkage, balancing population patterns with entity-specific characteristics. Layer 3 provides conformal sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees P(y in C(x)) >= 1-alpha for distribution-free uncertainty quantification. Validation on customer churn data demonstrates 96.7% +/- 4.2% AUC with 100 observations per business -- a +24.2 point improvement over independent logistic regression (72.5% +/- 8.1%), with p < 0.000001. Conformal prediction achieves 92% empirical coverage at 90% target. Training completes in 33 minutes on standard CPU hardware. By enabling enterprise-grade predictions for 33 million U.S. SMEs previously excluded from machine learning, SmallML addresses a critical gap in AI democratization. Keywords: Bayesian transfer learning, hierarchical models, conformal prediction, small-data analytics, SME machine learning

Cross-frequency transfer learning (CFTL) has emerged as a popular framework for curating large-scale time series datasets to pre-train foundation forecasting models (FFMs). Although CFTL has shown promise, current benchmarking practices fall short of accurately assessing its performance. This shortcoming stems from many factors: an over-reliance on small-scale evaluation datasets; inadequate treatment of sample size when computing summary statistics; reporting of suboptimal statistical models; and failing to account for non-negligible risks of overlap between pre-training and test datasets. To address these limitations, we introduce a unified reimplementation of widely-adopted neural forecasting networks, adapting them for the CFTL setup; we pre-train only on proprietary and synthetic data, being careful to prevent test leakage; and we evaluate on 15 large, diverse public forecast competition datasets. Our empirical analysis reveals that statistical models' accuracy is frequently underreported. Notably, we confirm that statistical models and their ensembles consistently outperform existing FFMs by more than 8.2% in sCRPS, and by more than 20% MASE, across datasets. However, we also find that synthetic dataset pre-training does improve the accuracy of a FFM by 7% percent.

Artificial intelligence systems in critical fields like autonomous driving and medical imaging analysis often continually learn new tasks using a shared stream of input data. For instance, after learning to detect traffic signs, a model may later need to learn to classify traffic lights or different types of vehicles using the same camera feed. This scenario introduces a challenging setting we term Continual Multitask Learning (CMTL), where a model sequentially learns new tasks on an underlying data distribution without forgetting previously learned abilities. Existing continual learning methods often fail in this setting because they learn fragmented, task-specific features that interfere with one another. To address this, we introduce Learning with Preserving (LwP), a novel framework that shifts the focus from preserving task outputs to maintaining the geometric structure of the shared representation space. The core of LwP is a Dynamically Weighted Distance Preservation (DWDP) loss that prevents representation drift by regularizing the pairwise distances between latent data representations. This mechanism of preserving the underlying geometric structure allows the model to retain implicit knowledge and support diverse tasks without requiring a replay buffer, making it suitable for privacy-conscious applications. Extensive evaluations on time-series and image benchmarks show that LwP not only mitigates catastrophic forgetting but also consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in CMTL tasks. Notably, our method shows superior robustness to distribution shifts and is the only approach to surpass the strong single-task learning baseline, underscoring its effectiveness for real-world dynamic environments.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have significantly advanced robotic learning, enabling training on large-scale, cross-embodiment data and fine-tuning for specific robots. However, state-of-the-art autoregressive VLAs struggle with multi-robot collaboration. We introduce embodiment transfer learning, denoted as ET-VLA, a novel framework for efficient and effective transfer of pre-trained VLAs to multi-robot. ET-VLA's core is Synthetic Continued Pretraining (SCP), which uses synthetically generated data to warm up the model for the new embodiment, bypassing the need for real human demonstrations and reducing data collection costs. SCP enables the model to learn correct actions and precise action token numbers. Following SCP, the model is fine-tuned on target embodiment data. To further enhance the model performance on multi-embodiment, we present the Embodied Graph-of-Thought technique, a novel approach that formulates each sub-task as a node, that allows the VLA model to distinguish the functionalities and roles of each embodiment during task execution. Our work considers bimanual robots, a simple version of multi-robot to verify our approaches. We validate the effectiveness of our method on both simulation benchmarks and real robots covering three different bimanual embodiments. In particular, our proposed ET-VLA \space can outperform OpenVLA on six real-world tasks over 53.2%. We will open-source all codes to support the community in advancing VLA models for robot learning.

Data for training structural health monitoring (SHM) systems are often expensive and/or impractical to obtain, particularly for labelled data. Population-based SHM (PBSHM) aims to address this limitation by leveraging data from multiple structures. However, data from different structures will follow distinct distributions, potentially leading to large generalisation errors for models learnt via conventional machine learning methods. To address this issue, transfer learning -- in the form of domain adaptation (DA) -- can be used to align the data distributions. Most previous approaches have only considered \emph{unsupervised} DA, where no labelled target data are available; they do not consider how to incorporate these technologies in an online framework -- updating as labels are obtained throughout the monitoring campaign. This paper proposes a Bayesian framework for DA in PBSHM, that can improve unsupervised DA mappings using a limited quantity of labelled target data. In addition, this model is integrated into an active sampling strategy to guide inspections to select the most informative observations to label -- leading to further reductions in the required labelled data to learn a target classifier. The effectiveness of this methodology is evaluated on a population of experimental bridges. Specifically, this population includes data corresponding to several damage states, as well as, a comprehensive set of environmental conditions. It is found that combining transfer learning and active learning can improve data efficiency when learning classification models in label-scarce scenarios. This result has implications for data-informed operation and maintenance of structures, suggesting a reduction in inspections over the operational lifetime of a structure -- and therefore a reduction in operational costs -- can be achieved.

Transfer learning has become a cornerstone of modern machine learning, as it can empower models by leveraging knowledge from related domains to improve learning effectiveness. However, transferring from poorly aligned data can harm rather than help performance, making it crucial to determine whether the transfer will be beneficial before implementation. This work aims to address this challenge by proposing an innovative metric to measure dataset similarity and provide quantitative guidance on transferability. In the literature, existing methods largely focus on feature distributions while overlooking label information and predictive relationships, potentially missing critical transferability insights. In contrast, our proposed metric, the Cross-Learning Score (CLS), measures dataset similarity through bidirectional generalization performance between domains. We provide a theoretical justification for CLS by establishing its connection to the cosine similarity between the decision boundaries for the target and source datasets. Computationally, CLS is efficient and fast to compute as it bypasses the problem of expensive distribution estimation for high-dimensional problems. We further introduce a general framework that categorizes source datasets into positive, ambiguous, or negative transfer zones based on their CLS relative to the baseline error, enabling informed decisions. Additionally, we extend this approach to encoder-head architectures in deep learning to better reflect modern transfer pipelines. Extensive experiments on diverse synthetic and real-world tasks demonstrate that CLS can reliably predict whether transfer will improve or degrade performance, offering a principled tool for guiding data selection in transfer learning.

Graph-based recommender systems are commonly trained in transductive settings, which limits their applicability to new users, items, or datasets. We propose NBF-Rec, a graph-based recommendation model that supports inductive transfer learning across datasets with disjoint user and item sets. Unlike conventional embedding-based methods that require retraining for each domain, NBF-Rec computes node embeddings dynamically at inference time. We evaluate the method on seven real-world datasets spanning movies, music, e-commerce, and location check-ins. NBF-Rec achieves competitive performance in zero-shot settings, where no target domain data is used for training, and demonstrates further improvements through lightweight fine-tuning. These results show that inductive transfer is feasible in graph-based recommendation and that interaction-level message passing supports generalization across datasets without requiring aligned users or items.