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When to transfer: a dynamic domain adaptation method for effective knowledge transfer

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Abstract

Transfer learning has achieved a lot of success recently in saving training samples. However, most of the existing methods only focus on what and how to transfer, but ignore when is the proper transfer time. In the study, we find that transfer useful knowledge at proper time is also significant for the performance. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic domain adaptation approach based on the particle swarm optimization evolutionary algorithm, which searches transfer opportunity automatically for different data domains and training stages. We evaluate the proposed method on various deep learning network structures, and find that the transfer coefficient has large variance in the first several training epochs, and becomes smaller later. This indicates that the features learned in the first several epochs are not stable and is not suitable for static transfer. In addition, the proposed method is not sensitive to the hyper-parameters generated, and it searches suitable transfer coefficients dynamically and automatically instead of conventional manual way. Extensive experiments conducted on various datasets and network structures demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

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Notes

  1. http://www.imageclef.org/2014/adaptation.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province under Grant No. 2021A1515011866 and Sichuan Province under Grant No. 2021YFG0018 and No. 2022YFG0314, and the Social Foundation of Zhongshan Sci-Tech Institute under Grant No. 420S36.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, People’s Republic of China

    Xiurui Xie, Hongjie Zhang & Zeheng Yang

  2. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 119077, Singapore

    Qing Cai & Malu Zhang

  3. School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, 611130, People’s Republic of China

    Qing Cai & Guisong Liu

  4. Zhongshan Institute, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Zhongshan, 528400, People’s Republic of China

    Guisong Liu

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  1. Xiurui Xie
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Correspondence to Guisong Liu.

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Xie, X., Cai, Q., Zhang, H. et al. When to transfer: a dynamic domain adaptation method for effective knowledge transfer. Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber. 13, 3491–3508 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-022-01608-5

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