Towards Accurate Knowledge Transfer via Target-awareness Representation Disentanglement

Fine-tuning deep neural networks pre-trained on large scale datasets is one of the most practical transfer learning paradigm given limited quantity of training samples. To obtain better generalization, using the starting point as the reference, either through weights or features, has been successfully applied to transfer learning as a regularizer. However, due to the domain discrepancy between the source and target tasks, there exists obvious risk of negative transfer. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning algorithm, introducing the idea of Target-awareness REpresentation Disentanglement (TRED), where the relevant knowledge with respect to the target task is disentangled from the original source model and used as a regularizer during fine-tuning the target model. Experiments on various real world datasets show that our method stably improves the standard fine-tuning by more than 2% in average. TRED also outperforms other state-of-the-art transfer learning regularizers such as L2-SP, AT, DELTA and BSS.