arXiv Machine Learning

A Theory of How Pretraining Shapes Inductive Bias in Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2602. 20062v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Pretraining and fine-tuning are central stages in modern machine learning systems.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Activation Boundary Matching: Task-Informed Initialization for Low-Rank Adaptation

The paper introduces Activation Boundary Matching for Low‑Rank Adaptation (ABM‑LoRA), a task‑informed initialization strategy that uses the signs of layer‑wise pre‑activations from a brief probe adapter as targets for a fresh adapter. By training with a margin‑based hinge objective on these activation boundaries, ABM‑LoRA captures useful adaptation directions that standard LoRA initializers miss, while requiring only a few forward passes. Experiments show that ABM‑LoRA outperforms or matches existing LoRA, SVD, and gradient‑based initializers across multiple models and benchmarks, including T5‑base/GLUE, ConvNeXt‑T, Swin‑T, Qwen2.5‑1.5B, and LLaMA2‑7B.

By Dongha Lee, Jinhee Park, Minjun Kim, Junseok Kwon
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4

Breaking the Scale Barrier: One-Shot Knowledge Transfer via Frequency Transform

arXiv:2603. 07523v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transferring knowledge by fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained networks has become a standard paradigm for downstream tasks, yet the knowledge of a pre-trained model is tightly coupled with monolithic architecture, which restricts flexible reuse across models of varying scales.

By Jianlu Shen, Fu Feng, Yucheng Xie, Jiaqi Lv, Xin Geng
arXiv AI
Jun 29

Applicability of memorization indicators for early spotting of overfitting while recalibrating sEMG-decoders on low sample sizes

arXiv:2606. 27855v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning models for surface electromyography (sEMG) can benefit substantially from subject-specific (re-)calibration, since no sufficiently large and diverse datasets are available to train fully generic decoders.

By Stephan J. Lehmler, Tobias Glasmachers, Ioannis Iossifidis
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Soft-TransFormers for Continual Learning

arXiv:2411. 16073v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inspired by the Well-initialized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (WLTH), we introduce Soft-TransFormers (Soft-TF), a continual learning framework that adapts a frozen pre-trained Transformer through task-specific soft subnetworks: real-valued multiplicative masks over the query, key, value, and output projections of selected self-attention layers.

By Haeyong Kang, Chang D. Yoo
arXiv AI
3d ago

Unmerge: Efficient Machine Unlearning via Task Arithmetic

The paper introduces Unmerge, an efficient machine unlearning algorithm that treats unlearning as the inverse of task arithmetic. By representing the forget component as a low‑rank basis at each layer, Unmerge optimizes three goals—matching the merged vector, suppressing leakage, and bounding correction size—to limit forget leakage and retain damage. Experiments on ResNet‑50, ViT‑S/16, and Llama‑3.2‑3B show significant performance gains over existing methods while maintaining privacy and feature‑distribution fidelity.

By Haoran Tang, Andrew Tan, Rajiv Khanna