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Fast Transfer Learning Method Using Random Layer Freezing and Feature Refinement Strategy

Recent work has utilized Moore-Penrose (MP) inverse in deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) learning, which achieves better generalization performance over the DCNN with a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) pipeline. However, Yang’s work has not gained much popularity in practice due to its high sensitivity of hyper-parameters and stringent demands of computational resources. To enhance its applicability, this paper proposes a novel MP inverse-based fast retraining strategy. In each training epoch, a random learning strategy that controls the number of convolutional layers trained in the backward pass is first utilized. Then, an MP inverse-based batch-by-batch learning strategy, which enables the network to be implemented without access to industrial-scale computational resources, is developed to refine the dense layer parameters. Experimental results empirically demonstrate that fast retraining is a unified strategy that can be used for all DCNNs. Compared to other learning strategies, the proposed learning pipeline has robustness against the hyper-parameters, and the requirement of computational resources is significantly reduced.

W. Zhang, Y. Yang, T. Akilan, Q. M. Jonathan Wu and T. Liu

IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (Volume 55, Issue 1, January 2025)

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