We propose novel model transfer-learning methods that refine a decision forest model @math learned within a “source” domain using a training set sampled from a “target” domain, assumed to be a variation of the source. We present two random forest transfer algorithms. The first algorithm searches greedily for locally optimal modifications of each tree structure by trying to locally expand or reduce the tree around individual nodes. The second algorithm does not modify structure, but only the parameter (thresholds) associated with decision nodes. We also propose to combine both methods by considering an ensemble that contains the union of the two forests. The proposed methods exhibit impressive experimental results over a range of problems.
The generic title transfer learning'' encompasses quite a few different paradigms. As noted by Levy and Markovitch @cite_10 , such paradigms are motivated by (implicit or explicit) modeling or process assumptions. For example, some paradigms, such as feature transfer'', are motivated by assumptions on the linkage between source and target domains (e.g., features at the target obtained by certain mappings applied on the source features). The survey by @cite_3 identifies the following settings, which are not mutually exclusive.
@cite_10 @cite_3
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Most previous heterogeneous transfer learning methods learn a cross-domain feature mapping between heterogeneous feature spaces based on a few cross-domain instance-correspondences, and these corresponding instances are assumed to be representative in the source and target domains respectively. However, in many real-world scenarios, this assumption may not hold. As a result, the constructed feature mapping may not be precise due to the bias issue of the correspondences in the target or (and) source domain(s). In this case, a classifier trained on the labeled transformed-source-domain data may not be useful for the target domain. In this paper, we present a new transfer learning framework called Hybrid Heterogeneous Transfer Learning (HHTL), which allows the corresponding instances across domains to be biased in either the source or target domain. Specifically, we propose a deep learning approach to learn a feature mapping between cross-domain heterogeneous features as well as a better feature representation for mapped data to reduce the bias issue caused by the cross-domain correspondences. Extensive experiments on several multilingual sentiment classification tasks verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach compared with some baseline methods. Since the seminal work of Thrun [16], the learning to learn paradigm has been defined as the ability of an agent to improve its performance at each task with experience, with the number of tasks. Within the object categorization domain, the visual learning community has actively declined this paradigm in the transfer learning setting. Almost all proposed methods focus on category detection problems, addressing how to learn a new target class from few samples by leveraging over the known source. But if one thinks of learning over multiple tasks, there is a need for multiclass transfer learning algorithms able to exploit previous source knowledge when learning a new class, while at the same time optimizing their overall performance. This is an open challenge for existing transfer learning algorithms. The contribution of this paper is a discriminative method that addresses this issue, based on a Least-Squares Support Vector Machine formulation. Our approach is designed to balance between transferring to the new class and preserving what has already been learned on the source models. Extensive experiments on subsets of publicly available datasets prove the effectiveness of our approach. Modern deep transfer learning approaches have mainly focused on learning generic feature vectors from one task that are transferable to other tasks, such as word embeddings in language and pretrained convolutional features in vision. However, these approaches usually transfer unary features and largely ignore more structured graphical representations. This work explores the possibility of learning generic latent relational graphs that capture dependencies between pairs of data units (e.g., words or pixels) from large-scale unlabeled data and transferring the graphs to downstream tasks. Our proposed transfer learning framework improves performance on various tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and image classification. We also show that the learned graphs are generic enough to be transferred to different embeddings on which the graphs have not been trained (including GloVe embeddings, ELMo embeddings, and task-specific RNN hidden unit), or embedding-free units such as image pixels. Transfer learning addresses the problem of how to leverage knowledge acquired in a source domain to improve the accuracy and speed of learning in a related target domain. This paper considers transfer learning with Markov logic networks (MLNs), a powerful formalism for learning in relational domains. We present a complete MLN transfer system that first autonomously maps the predicates in the source MLN to the target domain and then revises the mapped structure to further improve its accuracy. Our results in several real-world domains demonstrate that our approach successfully reduces the amount of time and training data needed to learn an accurate model of a target domain over learning from scratch. Feature learning with deep models has achieved impressive results for both data representation and classification for various vision tasks. Deep feature learning, however, typically requires a large amount of training data, which may not be feasible for some application domains. Transfer learning can be one of the approaches to alleviate this problem by transferring data from data-rich source domain to data-scarce target domain. Existing transfer learning methods typically perform one-shot transfer learning and often ignore the specific properties that the transferred data must satisfy. To address these issues, we introduce a constrained deep transfer feature learning method to perform simultaneous transfer learning and feature learning by performing transfer learning in a progressively improving feature space iteratively in order to better narrow the gap between the target domain and the source domain for effective transfer of the data from the source domain to target domain. Furthermore, we propose to exploit the target domain knowledge and incorporate such prior knowledge as a constraint during transfer learning to ensure that the transferred data satisfies certain properties of the target domain. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed constrained deep transfer feature learning method, we apply it to thermal feature learning for eye detection by transferring from the visible domain. We also applied the proposed method for cross-view facial expression recognition as a second application. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for both applications. Multi-source transfer learning has been proven effective when within-target labeled data is scarce. Previous work focuses primarily on exploiting domain similarities and assumes that source domains are richly or at least comparably labeled. While this strong assumption is never true in practice, this paper relaxes it and addresses challenges related to sources with diverse labeling volume and diverse reliability. The first challenge is combining domain similarity and source reliability by proposing a new transfer learning method that utilizes both source-target similarities and inter-source relationships. The second challenge involves pool-based active learning where the oracle is only available in source domains, resulting in an integrated active transfer learning framework that incorporates distribution matching and uncertainty sampling. Extensive experiments on synthetic and two real-world datasets clearly demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods over several baselines including state-of-the-art transfer learning methods. Code related to this paper is available at: https: github.com iedwardwangi ReliableMSTL. Transfer learning has benefited many real-world applications where labeled data are abundant in source domains but scarce in the target domain. As there are usually multiple relevant domains where knowledge can be transferred, multiple source transfer learning MSTL has recently attracted much attention. However, we are facing two major challenges when applying MSTL. First, without knowledge about the difference between source and target domains, negative transfer occurs when knowledge is transferred from highly irrelevant sources. Second, existence of imbalanced distributions in classes, where examples in one class dominate, can lead to improper judgement on the source domains' relevance to the target task. Since existing MSTL methods are usually designed to transfer from relevant sources with balanced distributions, they will fail in applications where these two challenges persist. In this article, we propose a novel two-phase framework to effectively transfer knowledge from multiple sources even when there exists irrelevant sources and imbalanced class distributions. First, an effective supervised local weight scheme is proposed to assign a proper weight to each source domain's classifier based on its ability of predicting accurately on each local region of the target domain. The second phase then learns a classifier for the target domain by solving an optimization problem which concerns both training error minimization and consistency with weighted predictions gained from source domains. A theoretical analysis shows that as the number of source domains increases, the probability that the proposed approach has an error greater than a bound is becoming exponentially small. We further extend the proposed approach to an online processing scenario to conduct transfer learning on continuously arriving data. Extensive experiments on disease prediction, spam filtering and intrusion detection datasets demonstrate that: i the proposed two-phase approach outperforms existing MSTL approaches due to its ability of tackling negative transfer and imbalanced distribution challenges, and ii the proposed online approach achieves comparable performance to the offline scheme. Cross-domain transfer learning (CDTL) is an extremely challenging task for the person re-identification (ReID). Given a source domain with annotations and a target domain without annotations, CDTL seeks an effective method to transfer the knowledge from the source domain to the target domain. However, such a simple two-domain transfer learning method is unavailable for the person ReID in that the source target domain consists of several sub-domains, e.g., camera-based sub-domains. To address this intractable problem, we propose a novel Many-to-Many Generative Adversarial Transfer Learning method (M2M-GAN) that takes multiple source sub-domains and multiple target sub-domains into consideration and performs each sub-domain transferring mapping from the source domain to the target domain in a unified optimization process. The proposed method first translates the image styles of source sub-domains into that of target sub-domains, and then performs the supervised learning by using the transferred images and the corresponding annotations in source domain. As the gap is reduced, M2M-GAN achieves a promising result for the cross-domain person ReID. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID and MSMT17 show the effectiveness of our M2M-GAN. Transfer learning addresses the problem of how to utilize plenty of labeled data in a source domain to solve related but different problems in a target domain, even when the training and testing problems have different distributions or features. In this paper, we consider transfer learning via dimensionality reduction. To solve this problem, we learn a low-dimensional latent feature space where the distributions between the source domain data and the target domain data are the same or close to each other. Onto this latent feature space, we project the data in related domains where we can apply standard learning algorithms to train classification or regression models. Thus, the latent feature space can be treated as a bridge of transferring knowledge from the source domain to the target domain. The main contribution of our work is that we propose a new dimensionality reduction method to find a latent space, which minimizes the distance between distributions of the data in different domains in a latent space. The effectiveness of our approach to transfer learning is verified by experiments in two real world applications: indoor WiFi localization and binary text classification. A major assumption in many machine learning and data mining algorithms is that the training and future data must be in the same feature space and have the same distribution. However, in many real-world applications, this assumption may not hold. For example, we sometimes have a classification task in one domain of interest, but we only have sufficient training data in another domain of interest, where the latter data may be in a different feature space or follow a different data distribution. In such cases, knowledge transfer, if done successfully, would greatly improve the performance of learning by avoiding much expensive data-labeling efforts. In recent years, transfer learning has emerged as a new learning framework to address this problem. This survey focuses on categorizing and reviewing the current progress on transfer learning for classification, regression, and clustering problems. In this survey, we discuss the relationship between transfer learning and other related machine learning techniques such as domain adaptation, multitask learning and sample selection bias, as well as covariate shift. We also explore some potential future issues in transfer learning research. Transfer learning borrows knowledge from a source domain to facilitate learning in a target domain. Two primary issues to be addressed in transfer learning are what and how to transfer. For a pair of domains, adopting different transfer learning algorithms results in different knowledge transferred between them. To discover the optimal transfer learning algorithm that maximally improves the learning performance in the target domain, researchers have to exhaustively explore all existing transfer learning algorithms, which is computationally intractable. As a trade-off, a sub-optimal algorithm is selected, which requires considerable expertise in an ad-hoc way. Meanwhile, it is widely accepted in educational psychology that human beings improve transfer learning skills of deciding what to transfer through meta-cognitive reflection on inductive transfer learning practices. Motivated by this, we propose a novel transfer learning framework known as Learning to Transfer (L2T) to automatically determine what and how to transfer are the best by leveraging previous transfer learning experiences. We establish the L2T framework in two stages: 1) we first learn a reflection function encrypting transfer learning skills from experiences; and 2) we infer what and how to transfer for a newly arrived pair of domains by optimizing the reflection function. Extensive experiments demonstrate the L2T's superiority over several state-of-the-art transfer learning algorithms and its effectiveness on discovering more transferable knowledge. Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to mitigate the domain shift when transferring knowledge from a supervised source domain to an unsupervised target domain. Adversarial Feature Alignment has been successfully explored to minimize the domain discrepancy. However, existing methods are usually struggling to optimize mixed learning objectives and vulnerable to negative transfer when two domains do not share the identical label space. In this paper, we empirically reveal that the erratic discrimination of target domain mainly reflects in its much lower feature norm value with respect to that of the source domain. We present a non-parametric Adaptive Feature Norm AFN approach, which is independent of the association between label spaces of the two domains. We demonstrate that adapting feature norms of source and target domains to achieve equilibrium over a large range of values can result in significant domain transfer gains. Without bells and whistles but a few lines of code, our method largely lifts the discrimination of target domain (23.7 from the Source Only in VisDA2017) and achieves the new state of the art under the vanilla setting. Furthermore, as our approach does not require to deliberately align the feature distributions, it is robust to negative transfer and can outperform the existing approaches under the partial setting by an extremely large margin (9.8 on Office-Home and 14.1 on VisDA2017). Code is available at this https URL. We are responsible for the reproducibility of our method. Standard inductive learning requires that training and test instances come from the same distribution. Transfer learning seeks to remove this restriction. In shallow transfer, test instances are from the same domain, but have a different distribution. In deep transfer, test instances are from a different domain entirely (i.e., described by different predicates). Humans routinely perform deep transfer, but few learning systems, if any, are capable of it. In this paper we propose an approach based on a form of second-order Markov logic. Our algorithm discovers structural regularities in the source domain in the form of Markov logic formulas with predicate variables, and instantiates these formulas with predicates from the target domain. Using this approach, we have successfully transferred learned knowledge among molecular biology, social network and Web domains. The discovered patterns include broadly useful properties of predicates, like symmetry and transitivity, and relations among predicates, such as various forms of homophily. Adversarial learning has been successfully embedded into deep networks to learn transferable features, which reduce distribution discrepancy between the source and target domains. Existing domain adversarial networks assume fully shared label space across domains. In the presence of big data, there is strong motivation of transferring both classification and representation models from existing large-scale domains to unknown small-scale domains. This paper introduces partial transfer learning, which relaxes the shared label space assumption to that the target label space is only a subspace of the source label space. Previous methods typically match the whole source domain to the target domain, which are prone to negative transfer for the partial transfer problem. We present Selective Adversarial Network (SAN), which simultaneously circumvents negative transfer by selecting out the outlier source classes and promotes positive transfer by maximally matching the data distributions in the shared label space. Experiments demonstrate that our models exceed state-of-the-art results for partial transfer learning tasks on several benchmark datasets. Adversarial learning has been successfully embedded into deep networks to learn transferable features, which reduce distribution discrepancy between the source and target domains. Existing domain adversarial networks assume fully shared label space across domains. In the presence of big data, there is strong motivation of transferring both classification and representation models from existing big domains to unknown small domains. This paper introduces partial transfer learning, which relaxes the shared label space assumption to that the target label space is only a subspace of the source label space. Previous methods typically match the whole source domain to the target domain, which are prone to negative transfer for the partial transfer problem. We present Selective Adversarial Network (SAN), which simultaneously circumvents negative transfer by selecting out the outlier source classes and promotes positive transfer by maximally matching the data distributions in the shared label space. Experiments demonstrate that our models exceed state-of-the-art results for partial transfer learning tasks on several benchmark datasets. In this paper, we propose an approach to the domain adaptation, dubbed Second-or Higher-order Transfer of Knowledge (So-HoT), based on the mixture of alignments of second-or higher-order scatter statistics between the source and target domains. The human ability to learn from few labeled samples is a recurring motivation in the literature for domain adaptation. Towards this end, we investigate the supervised target scenario for which few labeled target training samples per category exist. Specifically, we utilize two CNN streams: the source and target networks fused at the classifier level. Features from the fully connected layers fc7 of each network are used to compute second-or even higher-order scatter tensors, one per network stream per class. As the source and target distributions are somewhat different despite being related, we align the scatters of the two network streams of the same class (within-class scatters) to a desired degree with our bespoke loss while maintaining good separation of the between-class scatters. We train the entire network in end-to-end fashion. We provide evaluations on the standard Office benchmark (visual domains) and RGB-D combined with Caltech256 (depth-to-rgb transfer). We attain state-of-the-art results. Despite the remarkable success of Deep RL in learning control policies from raw pixels, the resulting models do not generalize. We demonstrate that a trained agent fails completely when facing small visual changes, and that fine-tuning---the common transfer learning paradigm---fails to adapt to these changes, to the extent that it is faster to re-train the model from scratch. We show that by separating the visual transfer task from the control policy we achieve substantially better sample efficiency and transfer behavior, allowing an agent trained on the source task to transfer well to the target tasks. The visual mapping from the target to the source domain is performed using unaligned GANs, resulting in a control policy that can be further improved using imitation learning from imperfect demonstrations. We demonstrate the approach on synthetic visual variants of the Breakout game, as well as on transfer between subsequent levels of Road Fighter, a Nintendo car-driving game. A visualization of our approach can be seen in this https URL and this https URL . Transfer Learning is a paradigm in machine learning to solve a target problem by reusing the learning with minor modifications from a different but related source problem. In this paper we propose a novel feature transference approach, especially when the source and the target problems are drawn from different distributions. We use deep neural networks to transfer either low or middle or higher-layer features for a machine trained in either unsupervised or supervised way. Applying this feature transference approach on Convolutional Neural Network and Stacked Denoising Autoencoder on four different datasets, we achieve lower classification error rate with significant reduction in computation time with lower-layer features trained in supervised way and higher-layer features trained in unsupervised way for classifying images of uppercase and lowercase letters dataset. In human learning, it is common to use multiple sources of information jointly. However, most existing feature learning approaches learn from only a single task. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task deep network to learn generalizable high-level visual representations. Since multitask learning requires annotations for multiple properties of the same training instance, we look to synthetic images to train our network. To overcome the domain difference between real and synthetic data, we employ an unsupervised feature space domain adaptation method based on adversarial learning. Given an input synthetic RGB image, our network simultaneously predicts its surface normal, depth, and instance contour, while also minimizing the feature space domain differences between real and synthetic data. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our network learns more transferable representations compared to single-task baselines. Our learned representation produces state-of-the-art transfer learning results on PASCAL VOC 2007 classification and 2012 detection. The transfer learning and domain adaptation problems originate from a distribution mismatch between the source and target data distribution. The causes of such mismatch are traditionally considered different. Thus, transfer learn- ing and domain adaptation algorithms are designed to ad- dress different issues, and cannot be used in both settings unless substantially modified. Still, one might argue that these problems are just different declinations of learning to learn, i.e. the ability to leverage over prior knowledge when attempting to solve a new task. We propose a learning to learn framework able to lever- age over source data regardless of the origin of the distri- bution mismatch. We consider prior models as experts, and use their output confidence value as features. We use them to build the new target model, combined with the features from the target data through a high-level cue integration scheme. This results in a class of algorithms usable in a plug-and-play fashion over any learning to learn scenario, from binary and multi-class transfer learning to single and multiple source domain adaptation settings. Experiments on several public datasets show that our approach consis- tently achieves the state of the art.