Learning to Transfer Learn

We propose a novel framework, learning to transfer learn (L2TL), to improve transfer learning on a target dataset by judicious extraction of information from a source dataset. Our framework considers joint optimization of strongly-shared weights between models of source and target tasks, and employs adaptive weights for scaling of constituent loss terms. The adaptation of the weights is done using a reinforcement learning (RL)-based policy model, which is guided based on a performance metric on the target validation set. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of L2TL given fixed models, consistently outperforming fine-tuning baselines on various datasets. In addition, in the regimes of small-scale target datasets and significant label mismatch between source and target datasets, L2TL outperforms previous methods by a large margin.