Overview

Transfer learning asks how a model trained on one task or domain can help with another, reducing the need for target-specific data and computation. Common approaches include pretraining followed by fine-tuning or parameter-efficient adapters, feature alignment for domain shifts, and knowledge transfer through distillation, model merging, or shared representations. Evaluations span zero-shot and few-shot transfer, cross-domain benchmarks in vision and language, and adaptation in settings such as clinical data, robotics, and scientific modeling. A central tension is that transferred knowledge can improve accuracy and sample efficiency or cause negative transfer; predicting when it will help, and separating reusable knowledge from dataset or architecture effects, remains difficult.

Latest papers

422 papers62 papers in the last four weeks, up 29% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

Apr 28, 2026

Transfer Learning for Tonal Noise Prediction in VRF Units Using Thermodynamic and Vibration Signals

The second-order harmonic (2f) component generated by twin-rotary compressor is a dominant low-frequency noise source of variable refrigerant flow (VRF) outdoor units, yet its amplitude fluctuates strongly with environmental thermal load and valve opening, making it difficult to assess accurately using conventional mechanism-based models. This paper proposes an unsupervised transfer learning method based on Domain-invariant Partial Least Squares (Di-PLS) to accurately predict 2f noise levels under new conditions using different signals. Prediction models utilizing thermodynamic signals and acceleration signals are constructed respectively, and the generalization performance of the proposed Di-PLS is systematically compared with traditional Partial Least Squares (PLS). Results demonstrate that Di-PLS significantly outperforms PLS by extracting cross-condition common features and minimizing the distribution discrepancy between the source and target domains. Specifically, the acceleration-based Di-PLS model achieves the best performance, maintaining prediction errors within 3 dB for all test cases. This superiority over thermodynamic-based models highlights a physical insight: while thermodynamic states drive dynamic changes, structural vibration possesses a stronger and more direct causal link to acoustic radiation.
Apr 27, 2026

Why Search When You Can Transfer? Amortized Agentic Workflow Design from Structural Priors

Automated agentic workflow design currently relies on per-task iterative search, which is computationally prohibitive and fails to reuse structural knowledge across tasks. We observe that optimized workflows converge to a small family of domain-specific topologies, suggesting that this combinatorial search is largely redundant. Building on this insight, we propose SWIFT (Synthesizing Workflows via Few-shot Transfer), a framework that amortizes workflow design into reusable structural priors. SWIFT first distills compositional heuristics and output-interface contracts from contrastive analysis of prior search trajectories across source tasks. At inference time, it conditions a single LLM generation pass on these priors together with cross-task workflow demonstrations to synthesize a complete, executable workflow for an unseen target task, bypassing iterative search entirely. On five benchmarks, SWIFT outperforms the state-of-the-art search-based method while reducing marginal per-task optimization cost by three orders of magnitude. It further generalizes to four additional unseen benchmarks and transfers successfully from GPT-4o-mini to three additional foundation models (Grok, Qwen, Gemma). Controlled ablations reveal that workflow demonstrations primarily transfer topological structure rather than surface semantics: replacing all operator names with random strings still retains over 93% of the full system's average performance.
Apr 27, 2026

Differentiable Faithfulness Alignment for Cross-Model Circuit Transfer

Mechanistic interpretability has made it possible to localize circuits underlying specific behaviors in language models, but existing methods are expensive, model-specific, and difficult to scale to larger architectures. We introduce Differentiable Faithfulness Alignment (DFA), a framework that transfers circuit information from a smaller source model to a larger target model through a learned differentiable alignment. DFA projects source-model node importance scores into the target model and trains this mapping with a soft faithfulness objective, avoiding full circuit discovery on the target model. We evaluate DFA on Llama-3 and Qwen-2.5 across six tasks spanning factual retrieval, multiple-choice reasoning, and arithmetic. The strongest results occur on Llama-3 11B→3\rightarrow3B, where aligned circuits are often competitive with direct node attribution and zero-shot transfer remains effective. Recovery weakens for larger source--target gaps and is substantially lower on Qwen-2.5, suggesting that transfer becomes harder as architectural and scaling differences increase. Overall, DFA consistently outperforms simple baselines and, in some settings, recovers target-model circuits with faithfulness comparable to or stronger than direct attribution. These results suggest that smaller models can provide useful mechanistic priors for larger ones, while highlighting both the promise and the limits of node-level cross-model circuit alignment.\footnote{Code is available at https://github.com/jasonshaoshun/dfa-circuits.
Apr 27, 2026

Propagation Structure-Semantic Transfer Learning for Robust Fake News Detection

Fake news generally refers to false information that is spread deliberately to deceive people, which has detrimental social effects. Existing fake news detection methods primarily learn the semantic features from news content or integrate structural features from propagation. However, in practical scenarios, due to the semantic ambiguity of informal language and unreliable user interactive behaviors on social media, there are inherent semantic and structural noises in news content and propagation. Although some recent works consider the effect of irrelevant user interactions in a hybrid-modeling way, they still suffer from the mutual interference between structural noise and semantic noise, leading to limited performance for robust detection. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes a novel Propagation Structure-Semantic Transfer Learning framework (PSS-TL) for robust fake news detection under a teacher-student architecture. Specifically, we design dual teacher models to learn semantics knowledge and structure knowledge from noisy news content and propagation structure independently. Besides, we design a Multi-channel Knowledge Distillation (MKD) loss to enable the student model to acquire specialized knowledge from the teacher models, thereby avoiding mutual interference. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.
Apr 26, 2026

Impact of Age Specialized Models for Hypoglycemia Classification

Disease progression varies with age and is influenced by underlying genetic, biochemical, and hormonal etiologies, suggesting the need for tailored monitoring, care, and medication beyond standard clinical guidelines. Specifically, in autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes (T1D), where patients depend on exogenous insulin to compensate for insulin deficiency, medication dosing and the physiological response reflected in vital signs can differ. Insulin therapy can lead to hypoglycemia, a dangerous condition characterized by decreased blood glucose levels (≤\leq70). This risk can be mitigated through improved diabetes management supported by data analytics. Notably, leveraging data from continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices, hypoglycemia onset can be predicted. However, while glucose variability, auto-antibody levels, and hypoglycemia occurrence differ across age groups, hypoglycemia classification most often only relies on population-based models specialized in specific age ranges. In this work, we classify hypoglycemia 0, 5-15, 20-45, and 50-120 minutes before onset using DiaData, a large CGM dataset of patients with T1D ranging from children to seniors. In particular, we investigate: 1) the generalizability of a population-based model including all age groups, 2) the impact of age-segmented models trained separately per age group, and 3) the effect of model individualization through transfer learning. The results show that a global population-based model yields similar or superior performance compared to age-segmented models. These findings suggest that data from children, teenagers, and adults can be combined for training models on hypoglycemia classification. While glucose variation differs across age groups, short-term hypoglycemic patterns are similar. However, data of children obtain their best recall with age specialized model.
Apr 22, 2026

Adapting TrOCR for Printed Tigrinya Text Recognition: Word-Aware Loss Weighting for Cross-Script Transfer Learning

Transformer-based OCR models have shown strong performance on Latin and CJK scripts, but their application to African syllabic writing systems remains limited. We present the first adaptation of TrOCR for printed Tigrinya using the Ge'ez script. Starting from a pre-trained model, we extend the byte-level BPE tokenizer to cover 230 Ge'ez characters and introduce Word-Aware Loss Weighting to resolve systematic word-boundary failures that arise when applying Latin-centric BPE conventions to a new script. The unmodified model produces no usable output on Ge'ez text. After adaptation, the TrOCR-Printed variant achieves 0.22% Character Error Rate and 97.20% exact match accuracy on a held-out test set of 5,000 synthetic images from the GLOCR dataset. An ablation study confirms that Word-Aware Loss Weighting is the critical component, reducing CER by two orders of magnitude compared to vocabulary extension alone. The full pipeline trains in under three hours on a single 8 GB consumer GPU. All code, model weights, and evaluation scripts are publicly released.
Apr 22, 2026

RADS: Reinforcement Learning-Based Sample Selection Improves Transfer Learning in Low-resource and Imbalanced Clinical Settings

A common strategy in transfer learning is few shot fine-tuning, but its success is highly dependent on the quality of samples selected as training examples. Active learning methods such as uncertainty sampling and diversity sampling can select useful samples. However, under extremely low-resource and class-imbalanced conditions, they often favor outliers rather than truly informative samples, resulting in degraded performance. In this paper, we introduce RADS (Reinforcement Adaptive Domain Sampling), a robust sample selection strategy using reinforcement learning (RL) to identify the most informative samples. Experimental evaluations on several real world clinical datasets show our sample selection strategy enhances model transferability while maintaining robust performance under extreme class imbalance compared to traditional methods.
Apr 22, 2026

SMART: A Spectral Transfer Approach to Multi-Task Learning

Multi-task learning is effective for related applications, but its performance can deteriorate when the target sample size is small. Transfer learning can borrow strength from related studies; yet, many existing methods rely on restrictive bounded-difference assumptions between the source and target models. We propose SMART, a spectral transfer method for multi-task linear regression that instead assumes spectral similarity: the target left and right singular subspaces lie within the corresponding source subspaces and are sparsely aligned with the source singular bases. Such an assumption is natural when studies share latent structures and enables transfer beyond the bounded-difference settings. SMART estimates the target coefficient matrix through structured regularization that incorporates spectral information from a source study. Importantly, it requires only a fitted source model rather than the raw source data, making it useful when data sharing is limited. Although the optimization problem is nonconvex, we develop a practical ADMM-based algorithm. We establish general, non-asymptotic error bounds and a minimax lower bound in the noiseless-source regime. Under additional regularity conditions, these results yield near-minimax Frobenius error rates up to logarithmic factors. Simulations confirm improved estimation accuracy and robustness to negative transfer, and analysis of multi-modal single-cell data demonstrates better predictive performance. The Python implementation of SMART, along with the code to reproduce all experiments in this paper, is publicly available at https://github.com/boxinz17/smart.
Apr 21, 2026

Fast Amortized Fitting of Scientific Signals Across Time and Ensembles via Transferable Neural Fields

Neural fields, also known as implicit neural representations (INRs), offer a powerful framework for modeling continuous geometry, but their effectiveness in high-dimensional scientific settings is limited by slow convergence and scaling challenges. In this study, we extend INR models to handle spatiotemporal and multivariate signals and show how INR features can be transferred across scientific signals to enable efficient and scalable representation across time and ensemble runs in an amortized fashion. Across controlled transformation regimes (e.g., geometric transformations and localized perturbations of synthetic fields) and high-fidelity scientific domains-including turbulent flows, fluid-material impact dynamics, and astrophysical systems-we show that transferable features improve not only signal fidelity but also the accuracy of derived geometric and physical quantities, including density gradients and vorticity. In particular, transferable features reduce iterations to reach target reconstruction quality by up to an order of magnitude, increase early-stage reconstruction quality by multiple dB (with gains exceeding 10 dB in some cases), and consistently improve gradient-based physical accuracy.
Apr 20, 2026

State Transfer Reveals Reuse in Controlled Routing

Prompt-based interventions can change model behavior, but trained success alone does not identify where the behaviorally relevant state is represented. We study this question in controlled routing tasks using interfaces chosen on support data, held-out query evaluation, and matched necessity, sufficiency, and wrong-interface controls. On GPT-2 triop, an early interface supports exact transfer under these tests. On GPT-2 add/sub, zero-retrain compiled transfer at the fixed interface recovers most of donor routing accuracy, while trainable prompt slots can relearn the same behavior at several other positions only after additional support examples and optimization. These results distinguish fixed-interface reuse from prompt relocation in a setting where the two can be tested directly. Qwen routing provides a cross-architecture consistency check for the same matched-interface pattern at the operator token, although donor-specific identity on the local V-path remains unresolved. Generation and reasoning branches are used to map scope: they show broader transport or weaker controller identifiability once control depends on longer trajectories or harder selection. In controlled routing, fixed-interface transfer is therefore stronger evidence of reuse than trained prompt success alone.
Apr 20, 2026

Rabies diagnosis in low-data settings: A comparative study on the impact of data augmentation and transfer learning

Rabies remains a major public health concern across many African and Asian countries, where accurate diagnosis is critical for effective epidemiological surveillance. The gold standard diagnostic methods rely heavily on fluorescence microscopy, necessitating skilled laboratory personnel for the accurate interpretation of results. Such expertise is often scarce, particularly in regions with low annual sample volumes. This paper presents an automated, AI-driven diagnostic system designed to address these challenges. We developed a robust pipeline utilizing fluorescent image analysis through transfer learning with four deep learning architectures: EfficientNetB0, EfficientNetB2, VGG16, and Vision Transformer (ViTB16). Three distinct data augmentation strategies were evaluated to enhance model generalization on a dataset of 155 microscopic images (123 positive and 32 negative). Our results demonstrate that TrivialAugmentWide was the most effective augmentation technique, as it preserved critical fluorescent patterns while improving model robustness. The EfficientNetB0 model, utilizing Geometric & Color augmentation and selected through stratified 3fold cross-validation, achieved optimal classification performance on cropped images. Despite constraints posed by class imbalance and a limited dataset size, this work confirms the viability of deep learning for automating rabies diagnosis. The proposed method enables fast and reliable detection with significant potential for further optimization. An online tool was deployed to facilitate practical access, establishing a framework for future medical imaging applications. This research underscores the potential of optimized deep learning models to transform rabies diagnostics and improve public health outcomes.
Apr 19, 2026

ATLAS: Constitution-Conditioned Latent Geometry and Redistribution Across Language Models and Neural Perturbation Data

Constitution-conditioned post-training can be analysed as a structured perturbation of a model's learned representational geometry. We introduce ATLAS, a geometry-first program that traces constitution-induced hidden-state structure across charts, models, and substrates. Instead of treating the relevant unit as a single behaviour, neuron, vector, or patch, ATLAS tests a local chart whose tangent structure, occupancy distribution, and behavioural coupling can be measured under system change. On Gemma, the anchored source-local chart captures 310 / 320 reviewed source rows and all 84 / 84 reviewed score-flip rows, but compact exact-patch sufficiency does not close, so the exportable unit is the broader source-defined family. Freezing that family, we re-identify a target-local realisation in an unadapted Phi model, where the fully adjudicated confirmatory contrast separates with AUC 0.984 and mean gap 5.50. In held-out ALM8 mouse frontal-cortex perturbation data, the same source-defined family receives support across 5/5 folds, with mean held-out AUC 0.72 and mean fold gap 4.50. A multiple-choice analysis provides the main boundary: nearby target-local signals can appear without source-faithful closure. The resulting correspondence is not coordinate identity, site identity, or a target-side mediation theorem. It is geometric recurrence under redistribution: written constitutions can induce recoverable latent geometry whose organisation remains detectable across model and substrate changes while its local coordinates, occupancy, and behavioural expression shift.
Apr 19, 2026

2D Pre-Training for 3D Pose Estimation

Pre-training is a general method that is used in a range of deep learning tasks. By first training a model on one task, and then further training on the downstream task used for final evaluation, the model is forced to learn a more general understanding of the input data. While pre-training has been applied to 3D Human Pose Estimation (HPE) previously, the scope of datasets used is typically very limited to some strong benchmarks, like Human3.6M. Therefore, in this project, we expand the scope of an existing 3D HPE scheme to be compatible with additional 2D and 3D HPE datasets, like Occlusion Person. We perform an extensive study on how aspects of 2D pre-training, such as model size, affect downstream performance, and to what extent pre-training can help the model generalize to different datasets. Experimental results show that 2D pre-training consistently outperforms training on 3D data alone, particularly in terms of computational efficiency. Finally, using MPII and Human3.6M, we are able to obtain an MPJPE score of under 64.5mm.
Apr 19, 2026

ARMove: Learning to Predict Human Mobility through Agentic Reasoning

Human mobility prediction is a critical task but remains challenging due to its complexity and variability across populations and regions. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have made progress in zero-shot prediction, but existing methods suffer from limited interpretability (due to black-box reasoning), lack of iterative learning from new data, and poor transferability. In this paper, we introduce ARMove, a fully transferable framework for predicting human mobility through agentic reasoning. To address these limitations, ARMove employs standardized feature management with iterative optimization and user-specific customization: four major feature pools for foundational knowledge, user profiles for segmentation, and an automated generation mechanism integrating LLM knowledge. Robust generalization is achieved via agentic decision-making that adjusts feature weights to maximize accuracy while providing interpretable decision paths. Finally, large-small model synergy distills strategies from large LLMs (e.g., 72B) to smaller ones (e.g., 7B), reducing costs and enhancing performance ceilings. Extensive experiments on four global datasets show ARMove outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on 6 out of 12 metrics (gains of 0.78% to 10.47%), with transferability tests confirming robustness across regions, users, and scales. The other 4 items also achieved suboptimal results. Transferability tests confirm its 19 robustness across regions, user groups, and model scales, while interpretability 20 analysis highlights its transparency in decision-making. Our codes are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ARMove-F847.
Apr 17, 2026

Improving Reasoning Capabilities in Small Models through Mixture-of-Layers Distillation with Stepwise Attention on Key Information

The significant computational demands of large language models have increased interest in distilling reasoning abilities into smaller models via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation. Current CoT distillation methods mainly focus on transferring teacher-generated rationales for complex reasoning to student models. However, they do not adequately explore teachers' dynamic attention toward critical information during reasoning. We find that language models exhibit progressive attention shifts towards key information during reasoning, which implies essential clues for drawing conclusions. Building on this observation and analysis, we introduce a novel CoT distillation framework that transfers the teacher's stepwise attention on key information to the student model. This establishes structured guidance for the student's progressive concentration on key information during reasoning. More importantly, we develop a Mixture of Layers module enabling dynamic alignment that adapts to different layers between the teacher and student. Our method achieves consistent performance improvements across multiple mathematical and commonsense reasoning datasets. To our knowledge, it is the first method to leverage stepwise attention within CoT distillation to improve small model reasoning.
Apr 16, 2026

Transfer Learning from Foundational Optimization Embeddings to Unsupervised SAT Representations

Foundational optimization embeddings have recently emerged as powerful pre-trained representations for mixed-integer programming (MIP) problems. These embeddings were shown to enable cross-domain transfer and reduce reliance on solver-generated labels. In this work, we investigate whether such representations generalize beyond optimization to decision problems, focusing on Boolean satisfiability (SAT). We adapt the foundational optimization architecture to SAT by mapping CNF formulas into the same bipartite constraint-variable graph representation used for MIPs. This allows direct reuse of the pre-trained embedding model without architectural changes or supervised fine-tuning. Our results show that these embeddings capture structural regularities in SAT instances and support unsupervised tasks such as instance clustering and distribution identification. We demonstrate, for the first time, that foundational optimization embeddings can transfer to constraint satisfaction domains. Our findings is a step toward a unified representational framework for both optimization and decision problems.
Apr 16, 2026

Temporal Cross-Modal Knowledge-Distillation-Based Transfer-Learning for Gas Turbine Vibration Fault Detection

Preventing machine failure is inherently superior to reactive remediation, particularly for critical assets like gas turbines, where early fault detection (FD) is a cornerstone of industrial sustainability. However, modern deep learning-based FD models often face a significant trade-off between architectural complexity and real-time operational constraints, often hindered by a lack of temporal context within restricted vibration signal windows. To address these challenges, this study proposes a Temporal Cross-Modal Knowledge-Distillation Transfer-Learning (TCMKDTL) framework. The framework employs a "privileged" teacher model trained on expansive temporal windows incorporating both past and future signal context to distill latent feature-based knowledge into a compact student model. To mitigate issues of data scarcity and domain shift, the framework leverages robust pre-training on benchmark datasets (such as CWRU) followed by adaptation to target industrial data. Extensive evaluation using experimental and industrial gas turbine (MGT-40) datasets demonstrates that TCMKDTL achieves superior feature separability and diagnostic accuracy compared to conventional pre-trained architectures. Ultimately, this approach enables high-performance, unsupervised anomaly detection suitable for deployment on resource-constrained industrial hardware.
Apr 15, 2026

Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Methane Sorption: Cross-Gas Transfer Learning, Ensemble Collapse Under Physics Constraints, and Monte Carlo Dropout Uncertainty Quantification

Accurate methane sorption prediction across heterogeneous coal ranks requires models that combine thermodynamic consistency, efficient knowledge transfer across data-scarce geological systems, and calibrated uncertainty estimates, capabilities that are rarely addressed together in existing frameworks. We present a physics-informed transfer learning framework that adapts a hydrogen sorption PINN to methane sorption prediction via Elastic Weight Consolidation, coal-specific feature engineering, and a three-phase curriculum that progressively balances transfer preservation with thermodynamic fine-tuning. Trained on 993 equilibrium measurements from 114 independent coal experiments spanning lignite to anthracite, the framework achieves R2 = 0.932 on held-out coal samples, a 227% improvement over pressure-only classical isotherms, while hydrogen pre-training delivers 18.9% lower RMSE and 19.4% faster convergence than random initialization. Five Bayesian uncertainty quantification approaches reveal a systematic divergence in performance across physics-constrained architectures. Monte Carlo Dropout achieves well-calibrated uncertainty at minimal overhead, while deep ensembles, regardless of architectural diversity or initialization strategy, exhibit performance degradation because shared physics constraints narrow the admissible solution manifold. SHAP and ALE analyses confirm that learned representations remain physically interpretable and aligned with established coal sorption mechanisms: moisture-volatile interactions are most influential, pressure-temperature coupling captures thermodynamic co-dependence, and features exhibit non-monotonic effects. These results identify Monte Carlo Dropout as the best-performing UQ method in this physics-constrained transfer learning framework, and demonstrate cross-gas transfer learning as a data-efficient strategy for geological material modeling.
Apr 14, 2026

Transferable Expertise for Autonomous Agents via Real-World Case-Based Learning

LLM-based autonomous agents perform well on general reasoning tasks but still struggle to reliably use task structure, key constraints, and prior experience in complex real-world settings. We propose a case-based learning framework that converts experience from past tasks into reusable knowledge assets, allowing agents to transfer prior case experience to new tasks and perform more structured analysis. Unlike methods based mainly on pretrained knowledge or static prompts, our framework emphasizes extracting and reusing task-relevant knowledge, analytical prompts, and operational skills from real cases. We evaluate the method on a unified benchmark of six complex task categories and compare it with Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, Checklist Prompt, and Rule Memory baselines. Results show that our method achieves consistently strong performance across all tasks and matches or outperforms the best baseline in every case, with especially clear gains on more complex tasks. Further analysis shows that the advantage of case-based learning increases with task complexity, and that practical knowledge acquired by one agent can be reused by others. These findings suggest that case-based learning offers a promising path for building professional agents for real-world work.
Apr 14, 2026

Chain-of-Models Pre-Training: Rethinking Training Acceleration of Vision Foundation Models

In this paper, we present Chain-of-Models Pre-Training (CoM-PT), a novel performance-lossless training acceleration method for vision foundation models (VFMs). This approach fundamentally differs from existing acceleration methods in its core motivation: rather than optimizing each model individually, CoM-PT is designed to accelerate the training pipeline at the model family level, scaling efficiently as the model family expands. Specifically, CoM-PT establishes a pre-training sequence for the model family, arranged in ascending order of model size, called model chain. In this chain, only the smallest model undergoes standard individual pre-training, while the other models are efficiently trained through sequential inverse knowledge transfer from their smaller predecessors by jointly reusing the knowledge in the parameter space and the feature space. As a result, CoM-PT enables all models to achieve performance that is mostly superior to standard individual training while significantly reducing training cost, and this is extensively validated across 45 datasets spanning zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks. Notably, its efficient scaling property yields a remarkable phenomenon: training more models even results in higher efficiency. For instance, when pre-training on CC3M: i) given ViT-L as the largest model, progressively prepending smaller models to the model chain reduces computational complexity by up to 72%; ii) within a fixed model size range, as the VFM family scales across 3, 4, and 7 models, the acceleration ratio of CoM-PT exhibits a striking leap: from 4.13X to 5.68X and 7.09X. Since CoM-PT is naturally agnostic to specific pre-training paradigms, we open-source the code to spur further extensions in more computationally intensive scenarios, such as large language model pre-training.
Apr 14, 2026

SMART Fine-tuning Factor Augmented Neural Lasso

Fine-tuning is a widely used strategy for adapting pre-trained models to new tasks, yet its methodology and theoretical properties in high-dimensional nonparametric settings with variable selection have not yet been developed. We propose a source-model-augmented residual tuning (SMART) framework, which incorporates the pre-trained source model as an augmented feature into the target learner and estimates only the residual target-specific component. The approach is widely applicable, from parametric and sparse models to neural networks and blackbox machine learning models. We focus on the development of fine-tuning factor-augmented neural Lasso, resulting in SMART-FAN-Lasso. This transfer-learning framework for high-dimensional nonparametric regression with variable selection simultaneously handles covariate and posterior shifts. We use a low-rank factor structure to manage high-dimensional dependent covariates and a residual tuning decomposition in which the target function is expressed as a function of source model and other target-specific variables, thereby reducing the effective complexity of the target task. We derive minimax-optimal excess risk bounds, characterizing the precise conditions, in terms of relative sample sizes and function complexities, under which fine-tuning yields statistical acceleration over single-task learning. Extensive numerical experiments across diverse covariate- and posterior-shift scenarios demonstrate that SMART-FAN-Lasso consistently outperforms standard baselines and achieves near-oracle performance even under severe target sample size constraints, empirically validating the derived rates.
Apr 12, 2026

Enhancing Cross-Problem Vehicle Routing via Federated Learning

Vehicle routing problems (VRPs) constitute a core optimization challenge in modern logistics and supply chain management. The recent neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) has demonstrated superior efficiency over some traditional algorithms. While serving as a primary NCO approach for solving general VRPs, current cross-problem learning paradigms are still subject to performance degradation and generalizability decay, when transferring from simple VRP variants to those involving different and complex constraints. To strengthen the paradigms, this paper offers an innovative "Multi-problem Pre-train, then Single-problem Fine-tune" framework with Federated Learning (MPSF-FL). This framework exploits the common knowledge of a federated global model to foster efficient cross-problem knowledge sharing and transfer among local models for single-problem fine-tuning. In this way, local models effectively retain common VRP knowledge from up-to-date global model, while being efficiently adapted to downstream VRPs with heterogeneous complex constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework not only enhances the performance in diverse VRPs, but also improves the generalizability in unseen problems.
Apr 11, 2026

Inductive Reasoning for Temporal Knowledge Graphs with Emerging Entities

Reasoning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) is essential for predicting future events and time-aware facts. While existing methods are effective at capturing relational dynamics, their performance is limited by a closed-world assumption, which fails to account for emerging entities not present in the training. Notably, these entities continuously join the network without historical interactions. Empirical study reveals that emerging entities are widespread in TKGs, comprising roughly 25% of all entities. The absence of historical interactions of these entities leads to significant performance degradation in reasoning tasks. Whereas, we observe that entities with semantic similarities often exhibit comparable interaction histories, suggesting the presence of transferable temporal patterns. Inspired by this insight, we propose TransFIR (Transferable Inductive Reasoning), a novel framework that leverages historical interaction sequences from semantically similar known entities to support inductive reasoning. Specifically, we propose a codebook-based classifier that categorizes emerging entities into latent semantic clusters, allowing them to adopt reasoning patterns from similar entities. Experimental results demonstrate that TransFIR outperforms all baselines in reasoning on emerging entities, achieving an average improvement of 28.6% in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) across multiple datasets. The implementations are available at https://github.com/zhaodazhuang2333/TransFIR.
Apr 10, 2026

DSVTLA: Deep Swin Vision Transformer-Based Transfer Learning Architecture for Multi-Type Cancer Histopathological Cancer Image Classification

In this study, we proposed a deep Swin-Vision Transformer-based transfer learning architecture for robust multi-cancer histopathological image classification. The proposed framework integrates a hierarchical Swin Transformer with ResNet50-based convolution features extraction, enabling the model to capture both long-range contextual dependencies and fine-grained local morphological patterns within histopathological images. To validate the efficiency of the proposed architecture, an extensive experiment was executed on a comprehensive multi-cancer dataset including Breast Cancer, Oral Cancer, Lung and Colon Cancer, Kidney Cancer, and Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL), including both original and segmented images were analyzed to assess model robustness across heterogeneous clinical imaging conditions. Our approach is benchmarked alongside several state-of-the-art CNN and transfer models, including DenseNet121, DenseNet201, InceptionV3, ResNet50, EfficientNetB3, multiple ViT variants, and Swin Transformer models. However, all models were trained and validated using a unified pipeline, incorporating balanced data preprocessing, transfer learning, and fine-tuning strategies. The experimental results demonstrated that our proposed architecture consistently gained superior performance, reaching 100% test accuracy for lung-colon cancer, segmented leukemia datasets, and up to 99.23% accuracy for breast cancer classification. The model also achieved near-perfect precision, f1 score, and recall, indicating highly stable scores across divers cancer types. Overall, the proposed model establishes a highly accurate, interpretable, and also robust multi-cancer classification system, demonstrating strong benchmark for future research and provides a unified comparative assessment useful for designing reliable AI-assisted histopathological diagnosis and clinical decision-making.
Apr 10, 2026

Transferable FB-GNN-MBE Framework for Potential Energy Surfaces: Data-Adaptive Transfer Learning in Deep Learned Many-Body Expansion Theory

Mechanistic understanding and rational design of complex chemical systems depend on fast and accurate predictions of electronic structures beyond individual building blocks. However, if the system exceeds hundreds of atoms, first-principles quantum mechanical (QM) modeling becomes impractical. In this study, we developed FB-GNN-MBE by integrating a fragment-based graph neural network (FB-GNN) into the many-body expansion (MBE) theory and demonstrated its capacity to reproduce first-principles potential energy surfaces (PES) for hierarchically structured systems with manageable accuracy, complexity, and interpretability. Specifically, we divided the entire system into basic building blocks (fragments), evaluated their one-fragment energies using a QM model, and addressed many-fragment interactions using the structure-property relationships trained by FB-GNNs. Our investigation shows that FB-GNN-MBE achieves chemical accuracy in predicting two-body (2B) and three-body (3B) energies across water, phenol, and mixture benchmarks, as well as the one-dimensional dissociation curves of water and phenol dimers. To transfer the success of FB-GNN-MBE across various systems with minimal computational costs and data demands, we developed and validated a teacher-student learning protocol. A heavy-weight FB-GNN trained on a mixed-density water cluster ensemble (teacher) distills its learned knowledge and passes it to a light-weight GNN (student), which is later fine-tuned on a uniform-density (H2O)21 cluster ensemble. This transfer learning strategy resulted in efficient and accurate prediction of 2B and 3B energies for variously sized water clusters without retraining. Our transferable FB-GNN-MBE framework outperformed conventional non-FB-GNN-based models and provided a scalable and accurate route toward interaction energies of large molecular assemblies.
Apr 10, 2026

MP-ISMoE: Mixed-Precision Interactive Side Mixture-of-Experts for Efficient Transfer Learning

Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for adapting pre-trained foundation models to downstream tasks, significantly reducing trainable parameters yet suffering from substantial memory overhead caused by gradient backpropagation during fine-tuning. While memory-efficient transfer learning (METL) circumvents this challenge by bypassing backbone gradient computation via lightweight small side networks, its stringent memory constraint severely limits learning capacity of side networks, thereby significantly compromising performance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Mixed-Precision Interactive Side Mixture-of-Experts framework (MP-ISMoE). Specifically, we first propose a Gaussian Noise Perturbed Iterative Quantization (GNP-IQ) scheme to quantize weights into lower-bits while effectively decreasing quantization errors. By leveraging memory conserved from GNP-IQ, we subsequently employ Interactive Side Mixture-of-Experts (ISMoE) to scaling up side networks without sacrificing overall memory efficiency. Different from conventional mixture-of-experts, ISMoE learns to select optimal experts by interacting with salient features from frozen backbones, thus suppressing knowledge forgetting and boosting performance. Extensive experiments across diverse vision-language and language-only tasks demonstrate that MP-ISMoE remarkably promotes accuracy compared to state-of-the-art METL approaches, while maintaining comparable parameter and memory efficiency.
Apr 9, 2026

When Fine-Tuning Changes the Evidence: Architecture-Dependent Semantic Drift in Chest X-Ray Explanations

Transfer learning followed by fine-tuning is widely adopted in medical image classification due to consistent gains in diagnostic performance. However, in multi-class settings with overlapping visual features, improvements in accuracy do not guarantee stability of the visual evidence used to support predictions. We define semantic drift as systematic changes in the attribution structure supporting a model's predictions between transfer learning and full fine-tuning, reflecting potential shifts in underlying visual reasoning despite stable classification performance. Using a five-class chest X-ray task, we evaluate DenseNet201, ResNet50V2, and InceptionV3 under a two-stage training protocol and quantify drift with reference-free metrics capturing spatial localization and structural consistency of attribution maps. Across architectures, coarse anatomical localization remains stable, while overlap IoU reveals pronounced architecture-dependent reorganization of evidential structure. Beyond single-method analysis, stability rankings can reverse across LayerCAM and GradCAM++ under converged predictive performance, establishing explanation stability as an interaction between architecture, optimization phase, and attribution objective.
Apr 9, 2026

ASPECT:Analogical Semantic Policy Execution via Language Conditioned Transfer

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle to generalize knowledge to new tasks, even those structurally similar to ones they have mastered. Although recent approaches have attempted to mitigate this issue via zero-shot transfer, they are often constrained by predefined, discrete class systems, limiting their adaptability to novel or compositional task variations. We propose a significantly more generalized approach, replacing discrete latent variables with natural language conditioning via a text-conditioned Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Our core innovation utilizes a Large Language Model (LLM) as a dynamic semantic operator at test time. Rather than relying on rigid rules, our agent queries the LLM to semantically remap the description of the current observation to align with the source task. This source-aligned caption conditions the VAE to generate an imagined state compatible with the agent's original training, enabling direct policy reuse. By harnessing the flexible reasoning capabilities of LLMs, our approach achieves zero-shot transfer across a broad spectrum of complex and truly novel analogous tasks, moving beyond the limitations of fixed category mappings. Code and videos are available here.
Apr 8, 2026

EgoVerse: An Egocentric Human Dataset for Robot Learning from Around the World

Robot learning increasingly depends on large and diverse data, yet robot data collection remains expensive and difficult to scale. Egocentric human data offer a promising alternative by capturing rich manipulation behavior across everyday environments. However, existing human datasets are often limited in scope, difficult to extend, and fragmented across institutions. We introduce EgoVerse, a collaborative platform for human data-driven robot learning that unifies data collection, processing, and access under a shared framework, enabling contributions from individual researchers, academic labs, and industry partners. The current release includes 1,362 hours (80k episodes) of human demonstrations spanning 1,965 tasks, 240 scenes, and 2,087 unique demonstrators, with standardized formats, manipulation-relevant annotations, and tooling for downstream learning. Beyond the dataset, we conduct a large-scale study of human-to-robot transfer with experiments replicated across multiple labs, tasks, and robot embodiments under shared protocols. We find that policy performance generally improves with increased human data, but that effective scaling depends on alignment between human data and robot learning objectives. Together, the dataset, platform, and study establish a foundation for reproducible progress in human data-driven robot learning. Videos and additional information can be found at https://egoverse.ai/
Apr 8, 2026

Zero-Shot Synthetic-to-Real Handwritten Text Recognition via Task Analogies

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models trained on synthetic handwriting often struggle to generalize to real text, and existing adaptation methods still require real samples from the target domain. In this work, we tackle the fully zero-shot synthetic-to-real generalization setting, where no real data from the target language is available. Our approach learns how model parameters change when moving from synthetic to real handwriting in one or more source languages and transfers this learned correction to new target languages. When using multiple sources, we rely on linguistic similarity to weigh their contrubition when combining them. Experiments across five languages and six architectures show consistent improvements over synthetic-only baselines and reveal that the transferred corrections benefit even languages unrelated to the sources.