Simple Transferability Estimation for Regression Tasks

Transfer learning has been a widely used technique to adapt a deep learning model trained for one task to another when there is a data distribution shift between these tasks. To improve the effectiveness of transfer learning and to understand relationships between tasks, we consider the problem of transferability estimation between regression tasks and propose two novel transferability estimators that are simple, computationally efficient, yet effective and theoretically grounded. We test our proposed methods extensively in various challenging, practical scenarios and show they significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art regression task transferability estimators in both accuracy and efficiency.