ModelRefs / Transfer Learning — AI Glossary
Transfer Learning — AI Glossary
Leveraging a model pretrained on a broad distribution as initialization for a narrower downstream task, amortizing pretraining cost.
Overview
All instruction-tuned and fine-tuned LLMs rely on transfer learning: a base model trained on trillions of tokens provides rich representations that fine-tuning on thousands of examples exploits. Transfer enables sample-efficient task adaptation; the degree of task similarity to pretraining determines transfer quality.
Reference details
| Topic | training |
|---|---|
| Last reviewed | 2026-06-24 |
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Frequently asked questions
What is Transfer Learning?
Leveraging a model pretrained on a broad distribution as initialization for a narrower downstream task, amortizing pretraining cost.
What concepts are related to Transfer Learning?
Closely related concepts include domain adaptation, sft, catastrophic forgetting.