14 research outputs found
A Survey on Negative Transfer
Transfer learning (TL) tries to utilize data or knowledge from one or more
source domains to facilitate the learning in a target domain. It is
particularly useful when the target domain has few or no labeled data, due to
annotation expense, privacy concerns, etc. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of
TL is not always guaranteed. Negative transfer (NT), i.e., the source domain
data/knowledge cause reduced learning performance in the target domain, has
been a long-standing and challenging problem in TL. Various approaches to
handle NT have been proposed in the literature. However, this filed lacks a
systematic survey on the formalization of NT, their factors and the algorithms
that handle NT. This paper proposes to fill this gap. First, the definition of
negative transfer is considered and a taxonomy of the factors are discussed.
Then, near fifty representative approaches for handling NT are categorized and
reviewed, from four perspectives: secure transfer, domain similarity
estimation, distant transfer and negative transfer mitigation. NT in related
fields, e.g., multi-task learning, lifelong learning, and adversarial attacks
are also discussed