Concept-wise Fine-tuning Matters in Preventing Negative Transfer
Yunqiao Yang Long-Kai Huang Ying Wei
A multitude of prevalent pre-trained models mark a major milestone in the
development of artificial intelligence, while fine-tuning has been a common
practice that enables pretrained models to figure prominently in a wide array
of target datasets. Our empirical results reveal that off-the-shelf finetuning
techniques are far from adequate to mitigate negative transfer caused by two
types of underperforming features in a pre-trained model, including rare
features and spuriously correlated features. Rooted in structural causal models
of predictions after fine-tuning, we propose a Concept-wise fine-tuning
(Concept-Tuning) approach which refines feature representations in the level of
patches with each patch encoding a concept. Concept-Tuning minimizes the
negative impacts of rare features and spuriously correlated features by (1)
maximizing the mutual information between examples in the same category with
regard to a slice of rare features (a patch) and (2) applying front-door
adjustment via attention neural networks in channels and feature slices
(patches). The proposed Concept-Tuning consistently and significantly (by up to
4.76%) improves prior state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods on eleven datasets,
diverse pre-training strategies (supervised and self-supervised ones), various
network architectures, and sample sizes in a target dataset.