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1. Minimax Lower Bounds for Transfer Learning with Linear and One-hidden layer Neural Networks

   M. M. Kalan, Z. Fabian (January 2020, Neural Information Processing Systems (NeuRIPS 2020))

   null (Ed.)

   Transfer learning has emerged as a powerful technique for improving the performance of machine learning models on new domains where labeled training data may be scarce. In this approach a model trained for a source task, where plenty of labeled training data is available, is used as a starting point for training a model on a related target task with only few labeled training data. Despite recent empirical success of transfer learning approaches, the benefits and fundamental limits of transfer learning are poorly understood. In this paper we develop a statistical minimax framework to characterize the fundamental limits of transfer learning in the context of regression with linear and one-hidden layer neural network models. Specifically, we derive a lower-bound for the target generalization error achievable by any algorithm as a function of the number of labeled source and target data as well as appropriate notions of similarity between the source and target tasks. Our lower bound provides new insights into the benefits and limitations of transfer learning. We further corroborate our theoretical finding with various experiments. 

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2. DART: A Principled Approach to Adversarially Robust Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

   Wang, Yunjuan; Hazimeh, Hussein; Ponomareva, Natalia; Kurakin, Alexey; Hammoud, Ibrahim; Arora, Raman (April 2025, 3rd IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (2025))

   In this work, we consider a setting where the goal is to achieve adversarial robustness on a target task, given only unlabeled training data from the task distribution, by leveraging a labeled training data from a different yet related source task distribution. The absence of the labels on training data for the target task poses a unique challenge as conventional adversarial robustness defenses cannot be directly applied. To address this challenge, we first bound the adversarial population 0-1 robust loss on the target task in terms of (i) empirical 0-1 loss on the source task, (ii) joint loss on source and target tasks of an ideal classifier, and (iii) a measure of worst-case domain divergence. Motivated by this bound, we develop a novel unified defense framework called Divergence-Aware adveRsarial Training (DART), which can be used in conjunction with a variety of standard UDA methods; e.g., DANN. DART is applicable to general threat models, including the popular \ell_p-norm model, and does not require heuristic regularizers or architectural changes. We also release DomainRobust, a testbed for evaluating robustness of UDA models to adversarial attacks. DomainRobust consists of 4 multidomain benchmark datasets (with 46 source-target pairs) and 7 meta-algorithms with a total of 11 variants. Our large-scale experiments demonstrate that, on average, DART significantly enhances model robustness on all benchmarks compared to the state of the art, while maintaining competitive standard accuracy. The relative improvement in robustness from DART reaches up to 29.2% on the source-target domain pairs considered. 

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3. Adversarially Robust Multi-task Representation Learning

   Watkins, Austin; Ullah, Enayat; Nguyen-Tang, Thanh; Arora, Raman (December 2024, 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024))

   We study adversarially robust transfer learning, wherein, given labeled data on multiple (source) tasks, the goal is to train a model with small robust error on a previously unseen (target) task. In particular, we consider a multi-task representation learning (MTRL) setting, i.e., we assume that the source and target tasks admit a simple (linear) predictor on top of a shared representation (e.g., the final hidden layer of a deep neural network). In this general setting, we provide rates on the excess adversarial (transfer) risk for Lipschitz losses and smooth nonnegative losses. These rates show that learning a representation using adversarial training on diverse tasks helps protect against inference-time attacks in data-scarce environments. Additionally, we provide novel rates for the single-task setting. 

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4. A Framework for Few-Shot Policy Transfer through Observation Mapping and Behavior Cloning

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10342477  

   Shukla, Y.; Kesari, B.; Goel, S.; Wright, R.; Sinapov, J. (November 2023, Proceedings of the IEEERSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems)

   Abstract— Despite recent progress in Reinforcement Learning for robotics applications, many tasks remain prohibitively difficult to solve because of the expensive interaction cost. Transfer learning helps reduce the training time in the target domain by transferring knowledge learned in a source domain. Sim2Real transfer helps transfer knowledge from a simulated robotic domain to a physical target domain. Knowledge transfer reduces the time required to train a task in the physical world, where the cost of interactions is high. However, most existing approaches assume exact correspondence in the task structure and the physical properties of the two domains. This work proposes a framework for Few-Shot Policy Transfer between two domains through Observation Mapping and Behavior Cloning. We use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) along with a cycle-consistency loss to map the observations between the source and target domains and later use this learned mapping to clone the successful source task behavior policy to the target domain. We observe successful behavior policy transfer with limited target task interactions and in cases where the source and target task are semantically dissimilar. 

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5. Distilling from Similar Tasks for Transfer Learning on a Budget

   Borup, Kenneth; Phoo, Cheng; Hariharan, Bharath (September 2023, IEEE International Conference of Computer Vision)

   We address the challenge of getting efficient yet accurate recognition systems with limited labels. While recognition models improve with model size and amount of data, many specialized applications of computer vision have severe resource constraints both during training and inference. Transfer learning is an effective solution for training with few labels, however often at the expense of a compu- tationally costly fine-tuning of large base models. We propose to mitigate this unpleasant trade-off between compute and accuracy via semi-supervised cross- domain distillation from a set of diverse source models. Initially, we show how to use task similarity metrics to select a single suitable source model to distill from, and that a good selection process is imperative for good downstream performance of a target model. We dub this approach DISTILLNEAREST. Though effective, DISTILLNEAREST assumes a single source model matches the target task, which is not always the case. To alleviate this, we propose a weighted multi-source distilla- tion method to distill multiple source models trained on different domains weighted by their relevance for the target task into a single efficient model (named DISTILL- WEIGHTED). Our methods need no access to source data, and merely need features and pseudo-labels of the source models. When the goal is accurate recognition under computational constraints, both DISTILLNEAREST and DISTILLWEIGHTED approaches outperform both transfer learning from strong ImageNet initializations as well as state-of-the-art semi-supervised techniques such as FixMatch. Averaged over 8 diverse target tasks our multi-source method outperforms the baselines by 5.6%-points and 4.5%-points, respectively. 

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