Transfer Learning

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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

CardsList

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

  1. A Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning Approach through Multitask Prompt Distillation and Decomposition for Clinical NLP

    Apr 8, 2026Cheng Peng, Mengxian Lyu, Ziyi Chen +1Parameter-Efficient Fine-TuningTransfer Learning

    Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA · Cancer Informatics Shared Resource, University of Florida Health Cancer Center, Gainesville, Florida, USA

  2. SCOT: Multi-Source Cross-City Transfer with Optimal-Transport Soft-Correspondence Objective

    Apr 8, 2026Yuyao Wang, Min Yang, Meng Chen +3Transfer LearningMulti-Source Domain Adaptation

    Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA · School of Software, Shandong University, Jinan, China · School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

  3. Toward a universal foundation model for graph-structured data

    Apr 7, 2026Sakib Mostafa, Lei Xing, Md. Tauhidul IslamGraph Transfer LearningGraph Representation Learning

    Department of Radiation Oncology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA · Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA · Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

  4. The Master Key Hypothesis: Unlocking Cross-Model Capability Transfer via Linear Subspace Alignment

    Apr 7, 2026Rishab Balasubramanian, Pin-Jie Lin, Rituraj Sharma +6Transfer LearningActivation Steering

    Virginia Tech · Amazon · UNC Chapel Hill

  5. Toward Aristotelian Medical Representations: Backpropagation-Free Layer-wise Analysis for Interpretable Generalized Metric Learning on MedMNIST

    Apr 7, 2026Michael Karnes, Alper YilmazInterpretable MLMedical Image Representation Learning

    The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA

  6. Constraint-Driven Warm-Freeze for Efficient Transfer Learning in Photovoltaic Systems

    Apr 7, 2026Yasmeen Saeed, Ahmed Sharshar, Mohsen GuizaniFine-TuningTransfer Learning

    Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

  7. Supervised Dimensionality Reduction Revisited: Why LDA on Frozen CNN Features Deserves a Second Look

    Apr 5, 2026Indar Kumar, Girish Karhana, Sai Krishna Jasti +1Dimensionality ReductionTransfer Learning

    independent researchers

  8. Align Then Adapt: Label-Efficient Adapter Learning for Asymmetric Dense Retrieval

    Apr 3, 2026Seiji Maekawa, Moin Aminnaseri, Pouya Pezeshkpour +1Dense RetrievalTransfer Learning

    Megagon Labs

  9. Bridging the Dimensionality Gap: A Taxonomy and Survey of 2D Vision Model Adaptation for 3D Analysis

    Apr 3, 2026Akshat Pandya, Bhavuk Jain3D Representation LearningVision Foundation Model Adaptation

    Independent Researcher

  10. Computing with Living Neurons: Chaos-Controlled Reservoir Computing with Knowledge Transplant

    Apr 2, 2026Seung Hyun Kim, Zhi Dou, Gaurav Upadhyay +6Reservoir ComputingNeuromorphic Computing

    Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign +6

  11. Time-Warping Recurrent Neural Networks for Transfer Learning

    Apr 2, 2026Jonathon HirschiTransfer LearningRecurrent Neural Networks

    University of Colorado Denver

  12. How and why does deep ensemble coupled with transfer learning increase performance in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia classification?

    Apr 2, 2026Sara Petiton, Antoine Grigis, Benoit Dufumier +1Loss LandscapeDeep Ensembles

    NeuroSpin/GAIA · NeuroSpin, CEA Saclay, Université Paris-Saclay, France · EPFL, NeuroSpin/GAIA +1

  13. Language-Pretraining-Induced Bias: A Strong Foundation for General Vision Tasks

    Apr 2, 2026Yaxin Luo, Zhiqiang ShenTransfer LearningVision Foundation Model Adaptation

    Department of Machine Learning MBZUAI

  14. Transfer learning for nonparametric Bayesian networks

    Apr 1, 2026Rafael Sojo, Pedro Larrañaga, Concha BielzaBayesian Network Structure LearningTransfer Learning

    Aingura IIoT, Paseo Mikeletegui 43, 20009 Donostia-San Sebastián, Gipuzkoa, Spain · Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial, 28660 Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain

  15. A Dual-Stream Transformer Architecture for Illumination-Invariant TIR-LiDAR Person Tracking

    Apr 1, 2026Yuki Minase, Kanji TanakaVisual Object TrackingRobotic Perception

    Yuki Minase and Kanji Tanaka are with the Graduate School of Engineering, University of Fukui, Japan.

  16. Task Scarcity and Label Leakage in Relational Transfer Learning

    Mar 31, 2026Francisco Galuppo Azevedo, Clarissa Lima Loures, Denis Oliveira CorreaTransfer LearningRelational Foundation Models

    Kunumi Institute, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil · Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

  17. Expectation Error Bounds for Transfer Learning in Linear Regression and Linear Neural Networks

    Mar 30, 2026Meitong Liu, Christopher Jung, Rui Li +2Transfer LearningGeneralization Bounds

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Meta

  18. Transfer Learning for an Endangered Slavic Variety: Dependency Parsing in Pomak Across Contact-Shaped Dialects

    Mar 30, 2026Sercan KarakaşDependency ParsingTransfer Learning

    University of Chicago

  19. What an Autonomous Agent Discovers About Molecular Transformer Design: Does It Transfer?

    Mar 30, 2026Edward WijayaNeural Architecture SearchTransfer Learning

    StemRIM, Inc.

  20. From Static to Dynamic: Exploring Self-supervised Image-to-Video Representation Transfer Learning

    Mar 27, 2026Yang Liu, Qianqian Xu, Peisong Wen +3Video Representation LearningTransfer Learning

    School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence +3

  21. Neural Network Conversion of Machine Learning Pipelines

    Mar 26, 2026Man-Ling Sung, Jan Silovsky, Man-Hung Siu +2Transfer LearningKnowledge Distillation

    Raytheon BBN Technologies, 10 Moulton Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

  22. How Class Ontology and Data Scale Affect Audio Transfer Learning

    Mar 26, 2026Manuel Milling, Andreas Triantafyllopoulos, Alexander Gebhard +2Transfer LearningAudio Classification

    CHI – Chair of Health Informatics, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany · MCML – Munich Center for Machine Learning, Munich, Germany · MDSI – Munich Data Science Institute, Munich, Germany +1

  23. C2W-Tune: Cavity-to -Wall Transfer Learning for Thin Atrial Wall Segmentation in 3D LGE-MRI

    Mar 26, 2026Yusri Al-Sanaani, Rebecca Thornhill, Sreeraman RajanMedical Image Segmentation3D Medical Image Segmentation

    Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada · Department of Radiology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

  24. Autotuning T-PaiNN: Enabling Data-Efficient GNN Interatomic Potential Development via Classical-to-Quantum Transfer Learning

    Mar 25, 2026Vivienne Pelletier, Vedant Bhat, Daniel J. Rivera +2Machine Learning Interatomic PotentialsData-Efficient Learning

    Materials Science & Engineering, School for the Engineering of Matter, Transport, & Energy, Arizona State University, 551 E. Tyler Mall, Tempe Arizona, 85287, USA · Chemical Engineering, School for the Engineering of Matter, Transport, & Energy, Arizona State University, 551 E. Tyler Mall, Tempe Arizona, 85287, USA

  25. Conformalized Transfer Learning for Li-ion Battery State of Health Forecasting under Manufacturing and Usage Variability

    Mar 25, 2026Samuel Filgueira da Silva, Mehmet Fatih Ozkan, Faissal El Idrissi +1Lithium-Ion BatteriesTransfer Learning

    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Center for Automotive Research, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

  26. The Gait Signature of Frailty: Transfer Learning based Deep Gait Models for Scalable Frailty Assessment

    Mar 25, 2026Laura McDaniel, Basudha Pal, Crystal Szczesny +5Gait AnalysisTransfer Learning

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA. · Division of Geriatrics and Gerontology Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA. · Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA. +3

  27. 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

  28. ELITE: Experiential Learning and Intent-Aware Transfer for Self-improving Embodied Agents

    Mar 25, 2026Bingqing Wei, Zhongyu Xia, Dingai Liu +3Lifelong Learning AgentsVLMs for Robotics

    Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University, Beijing, China

  29. Retinal Disease Classification from Fundus Images using CNN Transfer Learning

    Mar 24, 2026Ali AkramRetinal Disease ClassificationMedical Image Classification

    CliftonLarsonAllen (CLA)

  30. The Coordinate System Problem in Persistent Structural Memory for Neural Architectures

    Mar 24, 2026Abhinaba BasuMemory-Augmented Neural NetworksTransfer Learning

    National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NIELIT)