| Inductive Transfer |
Article Index for Inductive |
Website Links For Transfer |
Information AboutInductive Transfer |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT INDUCTIVE TRANSFER | |
| machine learning | |
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At the Neural Information Processing Conference in 1995 (NIPS 1995) Danny Silver and Rich Caruana led a successful two-day workshop on "Learning to Learn" that focused on the need for lifelong Machine Learning methods that retain and reuse learned knowledge (along with co-organizers Jon Baxter , Tom Mitchell , Lorien Pratt , and Sebastian Thrun ). The fundamental motivation for this meeting was the acceptance that machine learning systems would benefit from manipulating knowledge learned from related and/or prior experience and that this would enable them to move beyond task-specific tabula rasa systems. The workshop resulted in a series of articles published in a special issue of Connection Science 1996 , Machine Learning 28, 1997 and a book entitled "Learning to Learn" and Thrun 1998 . Research in inductive transfer has continued since 1995 under a variety of names: learning to learn, life-long learning, knowledge transfer, transfer learning, multitask learning, knowledge consolidation, context-sensitive learning, knowledge-based inductive bias, meta-learning, and incremental/cumulative learning. The recent burst of activity in this area is illustrated by the research in multi-task learning within the kernel and Bayesian contexts that has established new frameworks for capturing task relatedness to improve learning and Zhang 04, Bakker and Heskes 03, Jebara 04, Evgeniou, and Pontil 04, Evgeniou, Micchelli and Pontil 05, Chapelle and Harchaoui 05 . At NIPS 2005 a follow-on workshop entitled "Inductive Transfer: 10 Years Later" was organized by Danny Silver and Rich Caruana (along with co-organizers Goekhan Bakir , Kristin Bennett , Massimiliano Pontil , Stuart Russell , Prasad Tadepalli ). This workshop examined the progress that has been made in ten years, the questions and challenges that remain, and the opportunities for new applications of inductive transfer systems. The workshop organizers identified three major goals: (1) To summarize the work thus far in the area of inductive transfer so as to develop a taxonomy of research indicating open questions, (2) To share new theories, approaches and algorithms regarding the accumulation and use of learned knowledge for the purposes of more effective and efficient learning, (3) To discuss a more formal inductive transfer community (or special interest group) that might begin by offering a website, benchmarking data and methods, shared software, and links to various research programs and other web resources. As an example, please see the Machine Life-Long Learning website at http://birdcage.acadiau.ca:8080/ml3/. In 2005, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency initiated a multi-year research program in Transfer Learning. The workshop website has a host of additional information and can be found at http://iitrl.acadiau.ca/itws05/. |
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