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Main Authors: Millinghoffer, András, Bolgár, Bence, Antal, Péter
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24866
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author Millinghoffer, András
Bolgár, Bence
Antal, Péter
author_facet Millinghoffer, András
Bolgár, Bence
Antal, Péter
contents Transfer effects manifest themselves both during training using a fixed data set and in inductive inference using accumulating data. We hypothesize that perturbing the data set by including more samples, instead of perturbing the model by gradient updates, provides a complementary and more fundamental characterization of transfer effects. To capture this phenomenon, we quantitatively model transfer effects using multi-task learning curves approximating the inductive performance over varying sample sizes. We describe an efficient method to approximate multi-task learning curves analogous to the Task Affinity Grouping method applied during training. We compare the statistical and computational approaches to transfer, which indicates considerably higher compute costs for the previous but better power and broader applicability. Evaluations are performed using a benchmark drug-target interaction data set. Our results show that learning curves can better capture the effects of multi-task learning and their multi-task extensions can delineate pairwise and contextual transfer effects in foundation models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_24866
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Characterization of Transfer Using Multi-task Learning Curves
Millinghoffer, András
Bolgár, Bence
Antal, Péter
Machine Learning
Transfer effects manifest themselves both during training using a fixed data set and in inductive inference using accumulating data. We hypothesize that perturbing the data set by including more samples, instead of perturbing the model by gradient updates, provides a complementary and more fundamental characterization of transfer effects. To capture this phenomenon, we quantitatively model transfer effects using multi-task learning curves approximating the inductive performance over varying sample sizes. We describe an efficient method to approximate multi-task learning curves analogous to the Task Affinity Grouping method applied during training. We compare the statistical and computational approaches to transfer, which indicates considerably higher compute costs for the previous but better power and broader applicability. Evaluations are performed using a benchmark drug-target interaction data set. Our results show that learning curves can better capture the effects of multi-task learning and their multi-task extensions can delineate pairwise and contextual transfer effects in foundation models.
title Characterization of Transfer Using Multi-task Learning Curves
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24866