Transfer learning through greedy subset selection

Abstract

We study the binary transfer learning problem, focusing on how to select sources from a large pool and how to combine them to yield a good performance on a target task. In particular, we consider the transfer learning setting where one does not have direct access to the source data, but rather employs the source hypotheses trained from them. Building on the literature on the best subset selection problem, we propose an efficient algorithm that selects relevant source hypotheses and feature dimensions simultaneously. On three computer vision datasets we achieve state-of-the-art results, substantially outperforming transfer learning and popular feature selection baselines in a small-sample setting. Also, we theoretically prove that, under reasonable assumptions on the source hypotheses, our algorithm can learn effectively from few examples