用残差特征融合防止负迁移,理论证明有效且适用广泛。
Residual Feature Integration is Sufficient to Prevent Negative Transfer
- 在预训练特征基础上加可训练目标编码器,捕捉源模型忽略的信号。
- 理论保证:收敛速度不劣于从零训练,且能平滑过渡到近参数化效率。
- 适合需要安全迁移的场景,如分布偏移、标签噪声、多模态扩展等。
迁移学习已成为现代机器学习的核心范式,但长期面临负迁移问题——使用源域表征反而损害目标任务性能。尽管已有经验性缓解方法,但缺乏可靠的理论理解。本文提出一种简单而高效策略:在冻结的预训练源特征基础上,引入可训练的目标侧编码器,以捕获源模型遗漏的残差信号。我们证明该残差特征集成策略足以理论上避免负迁移,在目标分布信息丰富的类别下,其收敛速度不劣于从零训练(仅差对数因子),且当源特征有信息时,收敛率可无缝从非参数过渡至近参数。据我们所知,这是首个确保负迁移防护的理论工作。我们在图像、文本和表格基准上进行大量实验,验证该方法在分布偏移、标签噪声、语义扰动和类别不平衡下均能稳定保护性能。此外,该机制支持适应时的多模态扩展,使单细胞基础模型在未接触空间信息的情况下,仍可融合空间信号完成淋巴结解剖分类。本研究推动了安全迁移学习的理论发展,提供了一种简单、鲁棒、架构无关且广泛适用的方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Transfer learning has become a central paradigm in modern machine learning, yet it suffers from the long-standing problem of negative transfer, where leveraging source representations can harm rather than help performance on the target task. Although empirical remedies have been proposed, there remains little theoretical understanding of how to reliably avoid negative transfer. In this paper, we investigate a simple yet remarkably effective strategy: augmenting frozen, pretrained source-side features with a trainable target-side encoder that adapts target features to capture residual signals overlooked by models pretrained on the source data. We show this residual feature integration strategy is sufficient to provably prevent negative transfer, by establishing theoretical guarantees that it has no worse convergence rate than training from scratch under the informative class of target distributions up to logarithmic factors, and that the convergence rate can transition seamlessly from nonparametric to near-parametric when source representations are informative. To our knowledge, this is the first theoretical work that ensures protection against negative transfer. We carry out extensive numerical experiments across image, text and tabular benchmarks, and empirically verify that the method consistently safeguards performance under distribution shift, label noise, semantic perturbation, and class imbalance. We additionally demonstrate that this residual integration mechanism uniquely supports adapt-time multimodality extension, enabling a pretrained single-cell foundation model to incorporate spatial signals for lymph-node anatomical classification despite the source model being trained without them. Our study thus advances the theory of safe transfer learning, and provides a principled approach that is simple, robust, architecture-agnostic, and broadly applicable.
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