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

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

  1. Explainability-Aware Evaluation of Transfer Learning Models for IoT DDoS Detection Under Resource Constraints

    Feb 25, 2026Nelly ElsayedIoT Intrusion DetectionCybersecurity

    School of Information Technology, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, United States

  2. Are Foundation Models the Route to Full-Stack Transfer in Robotics?

    Feb 25, 2026Freek Stulp, Samuel Bustamante, João Silvério +3Transfer LearningRobot Foundation Models

    Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Wessling, Germany. · Stanford AI Lab, Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA.

  3. Do LLMs and VLMs Share Neurons for Inference? Evidence and Mechanisms of Cross-Modal Transfer

    Feb 22, 2026Chenhang Cui, An Zhang, Yuxin Chen +5Cross-Modal Representation TransferVLM Reasoning

    National University of Singapore, Singapore · University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  4. MEG-to-MEG Transfer Learning and Cross-Task Speech/Silence Detection with Limited Data

    Feb 20, 2026Xabier de Zuazo, Vincenzo Verbeni, Eva Navas +3Neural DecodingTransfer Learning

    HiTZ Center, University of the Basque Country – UPV/EHU, Spain · Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language – BCBL, Spain · Laboratory of Functional Anatomy, Faculty of Human Motor Sciences, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium +3

  5. Continual-NExT: A Unified Comprehension And Generation Continual Learning Framework

    Feb 20, 2026Jingyang Qiao, Zhizhong Zhang, Xin Tan +3Cross-Modal Representation TransferMultimodal Large Language Models

    East China Normal University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory +1

  6. Learning Without Training

    Feb 20, 2026Ryan O'DowdFunction ApproximationSupervised Learning

    Claremont Graduate University

  7. EgoScale: Scaling Dexterous Manipulation with Diverse Egocentric Human Data

    Feb 18, 2026Ruijie Zheng, Dantong Niu, Yuqi Xie +12Robotic ManipulationRobot Learning

    NVIDIA · University of California, Berkeley · University of Maryland

  8. AIFL: A Global Daily Streamflow Forecasting Model Using a Deterministic LSTM Pre-trained on ERA5-Land and Fine-tuned on IFS

    Feb 18, 2026Maria Luisa Taccari, Kenza Tazi, Oisín M. Morrison +7Streamflow ForecastingTime Series Forecasting

    European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Reading, United Kingdom · European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Bonn, Germany

  9. Transfer Learning of Linear Regression with Multiple Pretrained Models: Benefiting from More Pretrained Models via Overparameterization Debiasing

    Feb 18, 2026Daniel Boharon, Yehuda DarOverparameterizationTransfer Learning

    Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Ben-Gurion University.

  10. Contextual Intelligence The Next Leap for Reinforcement Learning

    Feb 17, 2026André BiedenkappContextual RLZero-Shot RL

    Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany

  11. Generalization from Low- to Moderate-Resolution Spectra with Neural Networks for Stellar Parameter Estimation: A Case Study with DESI

    Feb 16, 2026Xiaosheng Zhao, Yuan-Sen Ting, Rosemary F. G. Wyse +5Cross-Dataset GeneralizationTransfer Learning

    Department of Physics & Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA · Department of Astronomy, The Ohio State University, 140 West 18th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210, USA · Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics (CCAPP), The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA +6

  12. Affordance Transfer Across Object Instances via Semantically Anchored Functional Map

    Feb 16, 2026Xiaoxiang Dong, Weiming ZhiFunctional Maps3D Shape Matching

    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. · School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Australia. · Australian Centre for Robotics, The University of Sydney, Australia. +1

  13. Model Specific Task Similarity for Vision Language Model Selection via Layer Conductance

    Feb 1, 2026Wei Yang, Hong Xie, Tao Tan +3VLM EvaluationVision-Language Models

    School of AI and Data Science USTC

  14. Transfer Denoising of Low-Rank Plus Sparse Matrices under Ambient and Rank Growth

    Jan 29, 2026Elynn Chen, Jinhang Chai, Xuyuan Liu +1Transfer LearningLow-Rank Representation Learning

    Department of Technology, Operations, & Statistics, New York University · Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College

  15. Linear probing enables Ship-Radiated Noise recognition with pretrained audio embeddings

    Jan 13, 2026Hilde I. Hummel, Sandjai Bhulai, Rob D. van der Mei +1Audio Representation LearningLinear Probing

    Centre of Mathematics and Computer Science, Stochastics group, Science Park 123, Amsterdam, 1098 XG, Netherlands · Vrije Universiteit, Department of Mathematics, De Boelelaan 1111, Amsterdam, 1081 HV, Netherlands · Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Darwinweg 2, Leiden, 2333 CR, Netherlands

  16. Interpretable Multimodal EEG-ECG Framework for Neonatal Seizure Prediction and Patient-Adaptive Transfer Learning

    Nov 18, 2025Sithmini Ranasingha, Agasthi Haputhanthri, Hansa Marasinghe +5EEG Seizure DetectionCross-Subject EEG Decoding

    Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Canada · Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia +1

  17. Exploring the Underwater World Segmentation without Extra Training

    Nov 11, 2025Bingyu Li, Tao Huo, Da Zhang +3Image SegmentationOpen-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

    Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom, China · University of Science and Technology of China, China · Northwestern Polytechnical University, China

  18. Label-Efficient 3D Forest Mapping: Self-Supervised and Transfer Learning for Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, and Species Classification

    Nov 9, 2025Aldino Rizaldy, Fabian Ewald Fassnacht, Ahmed Jamal Afifi +3Self-Supervised LearningTree Species Classification

    Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology (HIF), 09599 Freiberg, Germany. · Institute of Geomatics, BOKU University, 1190 Vienna, Austria · Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics, Freie Universität Berlin, 12249 Berlin, Germany +1

  19. Formal Bayesian Transfer Learning via the Total Risk Prior

    Jul 31, 2025Nathan Wycoff, Ali Arab, Lisa O. SinghBayesian InferenceTransfer Learning

    Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst · Department of Computer Science, Georgetown University

  20. Energy-Based Transfer for Reinforcement Learning

    Jun 19, 2025Zeyun Deng, Jasorsi Ghosh, Fiona Xie +4Transfer Learning in RLTransfer Learning

    ♠Purdue University · ♢AWS AI · ♣Carnegie Mellon University

  21. MAGIK: Mapping to Analogous Goals via Imagination-enabled Knowledge Transfer

    Jun 2, 2025Ajsal Shereef Palattuparambil, Thommen George Karimpanal, Santu RanaReinforcement LearningTransfer Learning

    Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative, Deakin University · School of IT, Deakin University

  22. Bringing Generative Learning to Representation Learning: Self-Supervised Transfer Learning as Distribution Matching

    Feb 20, 2025Yuling Jiao, Wensen Ma, Defeng Sun +2Visual Representation LearningDistribution Matching

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University, 430072, Wuhan, China · School of Mathematics and Statistics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China · Department of Applied Mathematics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China +2

  23. Weight Space Learning for Certifiable Few-shot Transfer Learning

    Feb 10, 2025Fady Rezk, Royson Lee, Henry Gouk +2Transfer LearningWeight-Space Learning

    School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh · Samsung AI Center, Cambridge

  24. Evidence for Phenotype-Driven Disparities in Freezing of Gait Detection and Approaches to Bias Mitigation

    Jan 29, 2025Timothy Odonga, Jeanne M. Powell, Claire Bae +5Algorithmic FairnessHuman Activity Recognition

    Emory University · Georgia Institute of Technology

  25. GenTL: A General Transfer Learning Model for Building Thermal Dynamics

    Jan 23, 2025Fabian Raisch, Thomas Krug, Christoph Goebel +1Fine-TuningTransfer Learning

    Technical University of Applied Sciences Rosenheim Rosenheim, Germany · Technical University of Munich Munich, Germany

  26. Fixed-Gaussian Spectral Algorithms: Minimax Optimal Rates for Misspecified Learning and Transfer

    Jan 18, 2025Haotian Lin, Matthew ReimherrSpectral RegularizationConcept Drift

    Department of Statistics, The Pennsylvania State University.

  27. Training on Irrelevant States Implies Data Augmentation: Generalization in Contextual MDPs

    Oct 4, 2024Max Weltevrede, Caroline Horsch, Matthijs T. J. Spaan +1Reinforcement LearningRL Exploration

    Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

  28. 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

  29. 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

  30. Guided Adversarial Robust Transfer Learning with Source Mixing

    Sep 12, 2023Xin Xiong, Zijian Guo, Tianxi CaiAdversarial RobustnessDistributionally Robust Optimization

    Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA · Center for Data Science, Zhejiang University, Zhejiang, China · Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA