Auto-sharing parameters for transfer learning based on multi-objective optimization

Abstract

Transfer learning methods exploit similarities between different datasets to improve the performance of the target task by transferring knowledge from source tasks to the target task. “What to transfer” is a main research issue in transfer learning. The existing transfer learning method generally needs to acquire the shared parameters by integrating human knowledge. However, in many real applications, an understanding of which parameters can be shared is unknown beforehand. Transfer learning model is essentially a special multi-objective optimization problem. Consequently, this paper proposes a novel auto-sharing parameter technique for transfer learning based on multi-objective optimization and solves the optimization problem by using a multi-swarm particle swarm optimizer. Each task objective is simultaneously optimized by a sub-swarm. The current best particle from the sub-swarm of the target task is used to guide the search of particles of the source tasks and vice versa. The target task and source task are jointly solved by sharing the information of the best particle, which works as an inductive bias. Experiments are carried out to evaluate the proposed algorithm on several synthetic data sets and two real-world data sets of a school data set and a landmine data set, which show that the proposed algorithm is effective.