Paper abstract

An Algorithm for Transfer Learning in a Heterogeneous Environment

Andreas Argyriou - University College London, UK
Andreas Maurer - University College London, UK
Massimiliano Pontil - University College London, UK

Session: Transfer Learning
Springer Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87479-9_23

We consider the problem of learning in an environment of classification tasks. Tasks sampled from the environment are used to improve classification performance on future tasks. We consider situations in which the tasks can be divided into groups. Tasks within each group are related by sharing a low dimensional representation, which differs across the groups. We present an algorithm which divides the sampled tasks into groups and computes a common representation for each group. We report experiments on a synthetic and two image data sets, which show the advantage of the approach over single-task learning and a previous transfer learning method.