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

    Apr 28, 2026ZhiWei Su, Ding Wang, Yuan Guo +2Unsupervised Domain AdaptationTransfer Learning

    Corporate Research Center, Midea Group, Foshan528311, People’s Republic of China

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

    Apr 27, 2026Shiyi Du, Jiayuan Liu, Weihua Du +6Agentic WorkflowsLLM-Based Program Synthesis

    Carnegie Mellon University · Foundations of Cooperative AI Lab (FOCAL) · University of Notre Dame

  3. Differentiable Faithfulness Alignment for Cross-Model Circuit Transfer

    Apr 27, 2026Shun Shao, Binxu Wang, Shay B. Cohen +2LLM InterpretabilityMechanistic Interpretability

    University of Cambridge · Kempner Institute, Harvard University · University of Edinburgh +1

  4. Propagation Structure-Semantic Transfer Learning for Robust Fake News Detection

    Apr 27, 2026Mengyang Chen, Lingwei Wei, Han Cao +3Fake News DetectionText Classification

    Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Haidian District Beijing 100085, China · School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Huairou District Beijing 101408, China · State Key Laboratory of Communication Content Cognition, People’s Daily Online, Chaoyang District Beijing 100020, China

  5. Impact of Age Specialized Models for Hypoglycemia Classification

    Apr 26, 2026Beyza Cinar, Maria MaleshkovaType 1 DiabetesTime Series Classification

    Data Engineering · Helmut Schmidt University · Germany

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

    Apr 22, 2026Yonatan Haile Medhanie, Yuanhua NiTransfer LearningOptical Character Recognition

    College of Software Engineering, Nankai University, Tianjin, China · College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University, Tianjin, China

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

    Apr 22, 2026Wei Han, David Martinez, Anna Khanina +2Class-Imbalanced LearningFew-Shot Learning

    School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University · Department of Infectious Disease, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre · 3National Centre for Infections in Cancer, Melbourne +2

  8. SMART: A Spectral Transfer Approach to Multi-Task Learning

    Apr 22, 2026Boxin Zhao, Mladen Kolar, Jinchi LvMulti-Task LearningTransfer Learning

    University of Chicago · University of Southern California

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

    Apr 21, 2026Sophia Zorek, Kushal Vyas, Yuhao Liu +3Implicit Neural RepresentationsAmortized Inference

    Rice University · Argonne National Laboratory

  10. State Transfer Reveals Reuse in Controlled Routing

    Apr 20, 2026Yanzhen Lu, Zhicheng Qian, Muchen Jiang +1Prompt LearningTransfer Learning

    Shanghai Qizhi Institute · Southeast University · Nanjing Whale Cloud +1

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

    Apr 20, 2026Khalil Akremi, Mariem Handous, Zied Bouslama +4Data AugmentationMedical Diagnosis

    University of Carthage, Engineering School of Statistics and Information Analysis, Tunis, Tunisia. · University of Tunis-El-Manar, Rabies Laboratory, Institut Pasteur de Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia. · World Health Organization, Country Office Tunisia. +1

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

    Apr 19, 2026Gareth Seneque, Lap-Hang Ho, Nafise Erfanian Saeedi +2LLM AlignmentNeural Representation Geometry

    Australian Broadcasting Corporation

  13. 2D Pre-Training for 3D Pose Estimation

    Apr 19, 2026Liyao Jiang, Ruichen Chen, Keith G. Mills3D Human Pose EstimationHuman Pose Estimation

    University of Alberta

  14. ARMove: Learning to Predict Human Mobility through Agentic Reasoning

    Apr 19, 2026Chuyue Wang, Jie Feng, Yuxi Wu +2Transfer LearningAgentic Reasoning

    Tencent · Zhongguancun Academy · Alibaba Group +1

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

    Apr 17, 2026Yao Chen, Jiawei Sheng, Wenyuan Zhang +1CoT DistillationSmall Language Models

    Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

  16. Transfer Learning from Foundational Optimization Embeddings to Unsupervised SAT Representations

    Apr 16, 2026Koyena Pal, Serdar KadiogluUnsupervised Representation LearningTransfer Learning

    AI Center of Excellence, Fidelity Investments, USA · Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, USA · Department of Computer Science, Brown University, USA

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

    Apr 16, 2026Ali Bagheri Nejad, Mahdi Aliyari-Shoorehdeli, Abolfazl HasanzadehCross-Modal Knowledge DistillationPredictive Maintenance

    Electrical Engineering Department K. N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran · MECO, Karaj, Iran

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

    Apr 15, 2026Mohammad Nooraiepour, Zezhang Song, Wei Li +1Monte Carlo DropoutPhysics-Informed ML

    Environmental Geosciences, Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1047 Blindern, 0316 Oslo, Norway. · National Key Laboratory of Petroleum Resources and Engineering, China University of Petroleum (Beijing), China · College of Geosciences, China University of Petroleum (Beijing), China +3

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

    Apr 14, 2026Zhenyu Ma, Yuyang Song, Chunyi Yang +3Case-Based ReasoningLLM Agents

    National Glycoengineering Research Center, Shandong University, Qingdao 266237, China. · State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology, Shandong University, Qingdao 266237, China.

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

    Apr 14, 2026Jiawei Fan, Shigeng Wang, Chao Li +2Vision Foundation ModelsTransfer Learning

    Intel Labs China · iMotion Automotive Technology

  21. SMART Fine-tuning Factor Augmented Neural Lasso

    Apr 14, 2026Jinhang Chai, Jianqing Fan, Cheng Gao +1Fine-TuningTransfer Learning

    Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Princeton University

  22. Enhancing Cross-Problem Vehicle Routing via Federated Learning

    Apr 12, 2026Xiangchi Meng, Jianan Zhou, Jie Gao +4Vehicle RoutingNeural Combinatorial Optimization

    Dalian University of Technology · Nanyang Technological University · Delft University of Technology +1

  23. Inductive Reasoning for Temporal Knowledge Graphs with Emerging Entities

    Apr 11, 2026Ze Zhao, Yuhui He, Lyuwen Wu +6Knowledge GraphsTemporal KGs

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · IGSNRR, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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

    Apr 10, 2026Muazzem Hussain Khan, Tasdid Hasnain, Md. Jamil khan +4Histopathology Image ClassificationHybrid CNN-Transformer Architectures

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Metropolitan University, Sylhet-3104 · Department of Statistics, Pabna University of Science and Technology, Pabna-6600, Bangladesh · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology, Rajshahi-6204, Bangladesh +1

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

    Apr 10, 2026Siqi Chen, Zhiqiang Wang, Yili Shen +8Graph Neural NetworksMachine Learning Interatomic Potentials

    Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003 · Department of Chemistry, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003 · Also at Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431 +5

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

    Apr 10, 2026Yutong Zhang, Zimeng Wu, Shangcai Liao +2Transfer LearningMemory-Efficient Fine-Tuning

    State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University, Beijing, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China · College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

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

    Apr 9, 2026Kabilan Elangovan, Daniel TingExplainable Medical Image AnalysisTransfer Learning

    Singapore Health Services, Singapore · Singapore Eye Research Institute, Singapore

  28. ASPECT:Analogical Semantic Policy Execution via Language Conditioned Transfer

    Apr 9, 2026Ajsal Shereef Palattuparambil, Thommen George Karimpanal, Santu RanaZero-Shot RLZero-Shot Policy Transfer

    Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, Geelong · School of IT, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, Geelong

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

    Apr 8, 2026Ryan Punamiya, Simar Kareer, Zeyi Liu +37Cross-Embodiment Robot LearningRobot Learning

    Georgia Institute of Technology · Stanford University · University of California San Diego +5

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

    Apr 8, 2026Carlos Garrido-Munoz, Aniello Panariello, Silvia Cascianelli +4Synthetic-to-Real Domain AdaptationTransfer Learning

    University of Alicante, Spain · University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy