Google researchers investigate how transfer learning works

Transfer learning is an area of intense AI research -- it focuses on storing knowledge gained while solving a problem and applying it to a related problem. But despite recent breakthroughs, it's not yet well-understood what enables a successful transfer and which parts of algorithms are responsible for it. That's why Google researchers sought to develop analysis techniques tailored to explainability challenges in transfer learning. In a new paper, they say their contributions help to solve a few of the mysteries around why machine learning models successfully -- or unsuccessfully -- transfer. During the first of several experiments in the course of the study, the researchers sourced images from a medical imaging data set of chest x-rays (CheXpert) and sketches, clip art, and paintings from the open source DomainNet corpus.