Task transfer learning is a popular technique in image processing applications that uses pre-trained models to reduce the supervision cost of related tasks. An important question is to determine task transferability, i.e. given a common input domain, estimating to what extent representations learned from a source task can help in learning a target task. Typically, transferability is either measured experimentally or inferred through task relatedness, which is often defined without a clear operational meaning. In this paper, we present a novel metric, H-score, an easily-computable evaluation function that estimates the performance of transferred representations from one task to another in classification problems using statistical and information theoretic principles. Experiments on real image data show that our metric is not only consistent with the empirical transferability measurement, but also useful to practitioners in applications such as source model selection and task transfer curriculum learning.

本文提出了一个评估跨任务表示学习有效性的H-score度量方式，可以对在分类问题中从一个任务传递到另一个任务的表示的性能进行评估。使用实际图像数据进行的实验表明，该评价标准不仅与经验传递度量一致，而且在源模型选择和任务转移课程学习等应用中也非常有用。

任务迁移学习中可迁移性的信息论方法