LEVI: Generalizable Fine-tuning via Layer-wise Ensemble of Different Views

Fine-tuning is becoming widely used for leveraging the power of pre-trained foundation models in new downstream tasks. While there are many successes of fine-tuning on various tasks, recent studies have observed challenges in the generalization of fine-tuned models to unseen distributions (i.e., out-of-distribution; OOD). To improve OOD generalization, some previous studies identify the limitations of fine-tuning data and regulate fine-tuning to preserve the general representation learned from pre-training data. However, potential limitations in the pre-training data and models are often ignored. In this paper, we contend that overly relying on the pre-trained representation may hinder fine-tuning from learning essential representations for downstream tasks and thus hurt its OOD generalization. It can be especially catastrophic when new tasks are from different (sub)domains compared to pre-training data. To address the issues in both pre-training and fine-tuning data, we propose a novel generalizable fine-tuning method LEVI, where the pre-trained model is adaptively ensembled layer-wise with a small task-specific model, while preserving training and inference efficiencies. By combining two complementing models, LEVI effectively suppresses problematic features in both the fine-tuning data and pre-trained model and preserves useful features for new tasks. Broad experiments with large language and vision models show that LEVI greatly improves fine-tuning generalization via emphasizing different views from fine-tuning data and pre-trained features.

A new semi-supervised inductive transfer learning framework: Co-Transfer

In many practical data mining scenarios, such as network intrusion detection, Twitter spam detection, and computer-aided diagnosis, a source domain that is different from but related to a target domain is very common. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data is available in both source and target domains, but labeling each of them is difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and sometime unnecessary. Therefore, it is very important and worthwhile to fully explore the labeled and unlabeled data in source and target domains to settle the task in target domain. In this paper, a new semi-supervised inductive transfer learning framework, named Co-Transfer is proposed. Co-Transfer first generates three TrAdaBoost classifiers for transfer learning from the source domain to the target domain, and meanwhile another three TrAdaBoost classifiers are generated for transfer learning from the target domain to the source domain, using bootstraped samples from the original labeled data. In each round of co-transfer, each group of TrAdaBoost classifiers are refined using the carefully labeled data. Finally, the group of TrAdaBoost classifiers learned to transfer from the source domain to the target domain produce the final hypothesis. Experiments results illustrate Co-Transfer can effectively exploit and reuse the labeled and unlabeled data in source and target domains.