Title
Probing transfer learning with a model of synthetic correlated datasets
Abstract
Transfer learning can significantly improve the sample efficiency of neural networks, by exploiting the relatedness between a data-scarce target task and a data-abundant source task. Despite years of successful applications, transfer learning practice often relies on ad-hoc solutions, while theoretical understanding of these procedures is still limited. In the present work, we re-think a solvable model of synthetic data as a framework for modeling correlation between data-sets. This setup allows for an analytic characterization of the generalization performance obtained when transferring the learned feature map from the source to the target task. Focusing on the problem of training two-layer networks in a binary classification setting, we show that our model can capture a range of salient features of transfer learning with real data. Moreover, by exploiting parametric control over the correlation between the two data-sets, we systematically investigate under which conditions the transfer of features is beneficial for generalization.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1088/2632-2153/ac4f3f
MACHINE LEARNING-SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Keywords
DocType
Volume
transfer learning, correlated dataset, data modelling, statistical physics
Journal
3
Issue
Citations 
PageRank 
1
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Federica Gerace101.69
Luca Saglietti2224.31
Stefano Sarao Mannelli300.34
Andrew Saxe400.34
Lenka Zdeborová5119078.62