Cross-Domain Transfer Learning

Ask about this topic

Overview

Cross-domain transfer learning studies how a model trained in one setting can help in another, especially when target labels are scarce and data differ across hospitals, sensors, cities, or tasks. Common approaches include fine-tuning and parameter-efficient adapters, feature or distribution alignment, shared and domain-specific representations, and selective transfer using retrieval, prototypes, or expert routing. Work spans vision, medical prediction, graphs, language models, and reinforcement learning, with evaluations increasingly testing unseen domains, few-shot adaptation, calibration, and transfer in both directions. A central tension is that shared knowledge can improve accuracy and data efficiency but can also cause negative or asymmetric transfer, so in-domain results and simple measures of domain similarity do not reliably predict deployment performance.

Latest papers

CardsList

206 papers20 papers in the last four weeks, up 11% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. COTTA: Context-Aware Transfer Adaptation for Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving

    Apr 1, 2026Seohyoung Park, Jaeyeol Lim, Seoyoung Ju +3Trajectory PredictionAutonomous Driving

    Ewha Womans University · OUTTA · Seoul National University +2

  2. Feature-level Site Leakage Reduction for Cross-Hospital Chest X-ray Transfer via Self-Supervised Learning

    Mar 31, 2026Ayoub Louaye Bouaziz, Lokmane CheboubaCross-Domain Transfer LearningCross-Dataset Generalization

    University of Mentouri Brothers Constantine 1, Constantine, Algeria · University of Paris-VIII-Vincennes-Saint-Denis, France · LRIA Laboratory, University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene (USTHB), Bab-Ezzouar, Algeria +1

  3. ELViS: Efficient Visual Similarity from Local Descriptors that Generalizes Across Domains

    Mar 30, 2026Pavel Suma, Giorgos Kordopatis-Zilos, Yannis Kalantidis +1Image MatchingCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    VRG, FEE, Czech Technical University in Prague · NAVER LABS Europe

  4. OptiSAR-Net++: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Transformer-Free Framework for Cross-Domain Remote Sensing Visual Grounding

    Mar 25, 2026Xiaoyu Tang, Jun Dong, Jintao Cheng +1Remote SensingVision-Language Grounding

    School of Electronics and Information Engineering, and Xingzhi College, South China Normal University, Foshan 528225, China · School of Data Science and Engineering, and Xingzhi College, South China Normal University, Shanwei, 516600, China · Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China +1

  5. Causal Transfer in Medical Image Analysis

    Mar 25, 2026Mohammed M. Abdelsamea, Daniel Tweneboah Anyimadu, Tasneem Selim +4Medical Image AnalysisCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom · Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt · Hawkes Institute, Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, United Kingdom

  6. Transfer learning via interpolating structures

    Mar 23, 2026T. A. Dardeno, A. J. Hughes, L. A. Bull +3Transfer LearningCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    Dynamics Research Group, School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S1 3JD, UK · School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8SQ, Scotland

  7. BioDCASE 2026 Challenge Baseline for Cross-Domain Mosquito Species Classification

    Mar 20, 2026Yuanbo Hou, Vanja Zdravkovic, Marianne Sinka +5BioacousticsAudio Classification

    Machine Learning Research Group, University of Oxford · Oxford Long-Term Ecology Laboratory, University of Oxford · King’s College London +1

  8. STEP: Scientific Time-Series Encoder Pretraining via Cross-Domain Distillation

    Mar 19, 2026Chen Zhang, Liwei Liu, Jun Tao +6Time Series Representation LearningTime-Series Foundation Models

    Shanghai Aritificial Intelligence Laboratory · Tsinghua University · Harbin Institute of Technology +2

  9. Transfer Learning for Contextual Joint Assortment-Pricing under Cross-Market Heterogeneity

    Mar 18, 2026Elynn Chen, Xi Chen, Yi ZhangCross-Domain Transfer LearningAssortment Optimization

    New York University, Stern School of Business · Tsinghua University, School of Economics and Management

  10. Sample-Efficient Adaptation of Drug-Response Models to Patient Tumors under Strong Biological Domain Shift

    Mar 17, 2026Camille Jimenez Cortes, Philippe Lalanda, German VegaCancer Drug Response PredictionCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), France

  11. Evolutionary Transfer Learning for Dragonchess

    Mar 16, 2026Jim O'Connor, Annika Hoag, Sarah Goyette +1Game-Playing AgentsTransfer Learning

    Computer Science Department, Connecticut College, New London, United States

  12. Causal Cellular Context Transfer Learning (C3TL): An Efficient Architecture for Prediction of Unseen Perturbation Effects

    Mar 13, 2026Michael Scholkemper, Sach MukherjeeTransfer LearningCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    Statistics and Machine Learning, German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Bonn, Germany. · Statistics and Machine Learning, German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) Bonn, Germany, University of Bonn, Germany & University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.

  13. Cross-Domain Policy Optimization via Bellman Consistency and Hybrid Critics

    Mar 12, 2026Ming-Hong Chen, Kuan-Chen Pan, You-De Huang +2Reinforcement LearningCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan · Applied Machine Learning, Meta AI, Menlo Park, CA, USA

  14. Sparse Task Vector Mixup with Hypernetworks for Efficient Knowledge Transfer in Whole-Slide Image Prognosis

    Mar 11, 2026Pei Liu, Xiangxiang Zeng, Tengfei Ma +3Whole-Slide Image AnalysisCancer Survival Prediction

    College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University · National University of Singapore

  15. Cross-Domain Uncertainty Quantification for Selective Prediction: A Comprehensive Bound Ablation with Transfer-Informed Betting

    Mar 9, 2026Abhinaba BasuSelective PredictionCross-Domain Transfer Learning

  16. Transferable Optimization Network for Cross-Domain Image Reconstruction

    Mar 8, 2026Yunmei Chen, Chi Ding, Xiaojing YeImage ReconstructionCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    Department of Mathematics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA. · Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA.

  17. Skeleton-to-Image Encoding: Enabling Skeleton Representation Learning via Vision-Pretrained Models

    Mar 6, 2026Siyuan Yang, Jun Liu, Hao Cheng +5Skeleton-Based Action RecognitionCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. · Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK. · Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China. +3

  18. Domain-Adaptive Model Merging Across Disconnected Modes

    Mar 6, 2026Junming Liu, Yusen Zhang, Rongchao Zhang +2Model MergingCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    Tongji University · Peking University · Southeast University +1

  19. SAE as a Crystal Ball: Interpretable Features Predict Cross-domain Transferability of LLMs without Training

    Mar 3, 2026Qi Zhang, Yifei Wang, Xiaohan Wang +4Task Transferability EstimationCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    State Key Lab of General Artificial Intelligence, School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University · Meituan · Amazon AGI SF Lab +1

  20. Bridging Dynamics Gaps via Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge for Cross-Domain Reinforcement Learning

    Feb 27, 2026Hanping Zhang, Yuhong GuoReinforcement LearningCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

  21. LEDA: Latent Semantic Distribution Alignment for Multi-domain Graph Pre-training

    Feb 26, 2026Lianze Shan, Jitao Zhao, Dongxiao He +3Graph Foundation ModelsCross-Domain Generalization

    Tianjin University, Tianjin, China · Jilin University, Changchun, China · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

  22. Bayesian Meta-Learning with Expert Feedback for Task-Shift Adaptation through Causal Embeddings

    Feb 23, 2026Lotta Mäkinen, Jorge Loría, Samuel KaskiMeta-LearningOOD Generalization

    Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland · ELLIS Institute Finland, Espoo, Finland · Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

  23. Few-shot Classification as Multi-instance Verification: Effective Backbone-agnostic Transfer across Domains

    Jul 1, 2025Xin Xu, Eibe Frank, Geoffrey HolmesFew-Shot Domain AdaptationFew-Shot Image Classification

    Department of Computer Science University of Waikato Hamilton, New Zealand

  24. Bridging the Inter-Domain Gap through Low-Level Features for Cross-Modal Medical Image Segmentation

    May 17, 2025Pengfei Lyu, Pak-Hei Yeung, Jing Xia +5Cross-Modal LearningCross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation

    Northeastern University, Shenyang, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  25. Help Me Help You: The Aggregate Value of Source and Target Data in Transfer Learning

    Aug 29, 2024Steve Hanneke, Samory KpotufeTransfer LearningCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    Purdue University · Columbia University

  26. Generalization error of min-norm interpolators in transfer learning

    Jun 20, 2024Yanke Song, Kenneth Gu, Sohom Bhattacharya +1OOD GeneralizationCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    Department of Statistics, Harvard University · Department of Statistics, Stanford University · Department of Statistics, University of Florida