The high-dimensional features extracted from large-scale unlabeled data via various pretrained models with diverse architectures are referred to as heterogeneous multiview data. Most existing unsupervised transfer learning methods fail to faithfully recover intrinsic subspace structures when exploiting complementary information across multiple views. Therefore, a fundamental challenge involves constructing sparse similarity graphs that preserve these underlying subspace structures for achieving semantic alignment across heterogeneous views. In this paper, we propose a sparse attention graph learning (SAGL) method that learns subspace-preserving sparse attention graphs from heterogeneous multiview data. Specifically, we introduce a bilinear attention factorization scheme to capture asymmetric similarities among the high-dimensional features, which breaks the symmetry bottleneck that is inherent in the traditional representation learning techniques. A dynamic sparsity gating mechanism then predicts a feature-specific compression factor for adaptively controlling the topological contributions of neighbors. Furthermore, we employ a structured sparse projection via $\alpha$-entmax to generate subspace-preserving sparse attention graphs for individual views. SAGL leverages these view-specific graphs to conduct sparse information aggregation, yielding discriminative representations for multiview learning tasks. In addition, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis that bridges differentiable sparse attention and probability simplex constraints. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAGL consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised transfer learning approaches.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11881
This paper introduces a proactive Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) mobility management xApp for Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) Near Real-Time Radio Intelligent Controller (Near-RT RIC) environments, employing Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced with transfer learning to optimise handover decisions for UAVs operating along predetermined flight trajectories. Unlike reactive approaches that respond to signal degradation, the proposed framework anticipates network conditions and minimises both outage probability and handover frequency through predictive optimisation. The system leverages centralised weight averaging to consolidate knowledge from multiple flight scenarios into a global model capable of generalising to previously unseen operational environments without extensive retraining. A comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that the proposed framework achieves a favourable trade-off between handover frequency and connectivity reliability, reducing handover events by up to 54.6% compared to greedy approaches while maintaining outage probability at practically negligible levels. The results validate the effectiveness of intelligent learning-based approaches for UAV mobility management in next-generation O-RAN architectures, thereby contributing to seamless integration of aerial user equipment into cellular networks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10704
Part-of-speech (POS) tagging for Medieval Romance languages remains challenging due to orthographic variation, morphological complexity, and limited annotated resources. This paper presents a systematic empirical evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for POS tagging across three medieval varieties: Medieval Occitan, Medieval Catalan, and Medieval French. We compare traditional rule-based and statistical taggers with modern open-source LLMs under zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, monolingual fine-tuning, and cross-lingual transfer learning settings. Experiments on historically grounded datasets show that LLM-based approaches consistently outperform traditional taggers, with fine-tuning and multilingual training yielding the largest improvements. In particular, cross-lingual transfer learning substantially benefits under-resourced varieties, while targeted bilingual training can outperform broader multilingual configurations for specific target languages. The results highlight the importance of linguistic proximity and dataset characteristics when designing transfer strategies for historical NLP. These findings provide empirical insights into the applicability of modern neural methods to medieval text processing and provide practical guidance for deploying LLM-based POS tagging pipelines in digital humanities research. All code, models, and processed datasets are released for reproducibility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09147
Purpose: To develop and evaluate cross-sequence transfer learning for automatic femoral cartilage segmentation, testing bidirectional transfer between dual-echo steady-state (DESS) and sagittal proton density-weighted 3D fast spin-echo (Cube) sequences. Materials and Methods: We optimized a modified 2D U-Net on 507 DESS images from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI). We then established same-sequence baselines using subject-level cross-validation on a subset of 44 OAI DESS images and 44 Cube images acquired at the Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli, Bologna, Italy. Each subset included 22 non-lesioned and 22 lesioned subjects. Finally, we performed transfer learning across sequences by fine-tuning the pretrained models on the target sequence with increasing training set sizes to study convergence, while keeping validation and test sets fixed. Segmentations were evaluated using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and average surface distance (ASD). Lesion effects were assessed with two-sided Mann-Whitney U tests with Bonferroni correction. Results: Same-sequence training yielded higher accuracy on DESS than Cube (DSC, $0.900$ vs $0.830$; $P < .001$). Cube-to-DESS transfer matched DESS performance (DSC, $0.903 \pm 0.032$ vs $0.900 \pm 0.027$), reaching a performance plateau at 9 training subjects. DESS-to-Cube yielded a lower combined DSC ($0.802 \pm 0.049$ vs $0.830 \pm 0.042$), reaching a plateau at 24 training subjects. Lesions did not affect DESS ($P \ge .39$) but reduced Cube accuracy (DSC, $0.805$ vs $0.856$; $P < .001$). Conclusion: Transfer learning across sequences can substantially reduce target-sequence annotation requirements for femoral cartilage segmentation, but performance is direction- and sequence-dependent, and the effects of lesions on segmentation may vary across MRI sequences.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09067
We propose CAST, a dual-stream architecture that utilizes channel-aware spatial transfer learning for isolated sign language recognition addressing the challenges of magnitude-only 60~GHz radar Range-Time Maps (RTM). The proposed framework combines three physics-aware architectures with pretrained vision backbones, which operate under radar-only constraints across clinical and alphabetical gestures. First, an explicit decibel-to-linear inversion is combined with a windowed fast Fourier transform that extracts Cadence Velocity Diagrams (CVD) while avoiding the harmonic artifacts that arise from the spectral analysis of log-compressed signals. Second, a cross-antenna spatial attention module applies attention to raw antenna channels before the convolution, preserving inter-receiver amplitude covariance. Third, an asymmetric cross-attention mechanism fuses representations from parallel ConvNeXt-Tiny (CVD) and EfficientNetV2-S (RTM) backbones. Extensive experiments reveal that the architecture achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 80.5% under 5-fold cross-validation, establishing a 3.3% improvement over the best single-model baseline (77.2%). The findings suggest that physics-aware signal representations form a promising direction for radar-only sign language recognition under constrained sensor modalities. The source code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08663
Optical neural networks are emerging as powerful machine learning and information processing tools because of their potential advantages in speed and energy efficiency. The training methods of these physical models, however, remain underexplored compared to their digital counterparts and are leading to suboptimal performance. This paper reports a pre-training-driven approach that leads to snapshot image denoising with substantially improved quality. We demonstrated effective free-space optical denoising by a diffractive network optimized by a two-step process including (1) pre-training using a massive dataset of 3.45 million diverse but simple images and (2) fine-tuning with the corresponding task-specific datasets. Compared to conventional Fourier-domain filtering and directly trained diffractive networks, such a transfer learning process exhibited prominent advantages for denoising images degraded by severe noise, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) below 8 dB, while preserving fine image features and improving the PSNR to above 18 dB. Importantly, the same pre-trained optical network could be consistently fine-tuned to process degraded images from highly diverse styles ranging from handwritten digits (MNIST) and chest X-rays (ChestMNIST) to CIFAR-10 images and human faces (CelebA). We further demonstrated the critical role of our optical denoisers in vision-based applications, including face detection, plate recognition, and localization of UAVs in noisy conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07810
Non-alcoholic fatty pancreas disease (NAFPD) is an underdiagnosed condition associated with metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, and increased risk of pancreatic cancer. Diagnosis typically relies on subjective visual assessment of ultrasound images by clinicians. We propose an end-to-end framework for automatically classifying normal versus fatty pancreas from abdominal ultrasound images. Our method employs a TransUNet-based segmentation architecture with a ResNet encoder and transformer bottleneck to delineate the pancreas and the splenic vein, followed by anatomically-guided patch extraction and patient-level classification through pairwise texture comparison. The feature engineering mimics clinical reasoning by comparing the echogenicity of peri-venous fat to the pancreatic parenchyma, providing an interpretable signal for classification. The segmentation models are initialized via domain-specific transfer learning from a liver segmentation task. We validate the full pipeline on a clinical dataset of 214 abdominal ultrasound images with 107 expert-labeled cases using 5-fold cross-validation. SVM with RBF kernel achieves a mean cross-validated accuracy of 89.7\%\,$\pm$\,1.8\% and F1 of 0.898\,$\pm$\,0.019, while the unsupervised K-Means baseline reaches 87.8\% accuracy, demonstrating that the proposed features capture the relevant clinical signal even without labeled training data. To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end automated framework for fatty pancreas classification from ultrasound using segmentation-guided texture analysis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07466
Transformer architecture search (TAS) discovers optimal vision transformer (ViT) architectures automatically, reducing human effort to manually design ViTs. However, existing TAS methods suffer from the feature collapse problem, where subnets within a supernet fail to learn subnet-specific features, mainly due to the shared weights in a supernet, limiting the performance of individual subnets. To address this, we propose TAS-LoRA, a novel method that introduces parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to enable subnet-specific feature learning, while maintaining computational efficiency. TAS-LoRA incorporates a Mixture-of-LoRAExperts (MoLE) strategy, where a lightweight router dynamically assigns LoRA experts based on subnet architectures, and introduces a group-wise router initialization technique to encourage diverse feature learning across experts early in training. Extensive experiments on ImageNet and several transfer learning benchmarks, including CIFAR-10/100, Flowers, CARS, and INAT-19, demonstrate that TAS-LoRA mitigates feature collapse effectively, improving performance over state-of-the-art TAS methods significantly.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07256
Dataset distillation compresses a large training set into a small synthetic set that preserves downstream training utility. While most existing methods target training networks from scratch, modern visual transfer learning often uses frozen pre-trained encoders followed by lightweight linear probing. Existing distillation methods for this setting either unroll iterative linear-probe updates with trajectory-based gradient matching, or rely on closed-form formulations originally designed for from-scratch training with neural-tangent-kernel (NTK) approximations. Neither route exploits the fact that frozen-feature linear probing admits a closed-form solution determined directly by the pre-trained features themselves, with no infinite-width approximation and no inner-loop trajectory. We propose Closed-Form Linear-Probe Dataset Distillation (CLP-DD), a bilevel formulation that computes the linear probe induced by the synthetic set with a sample-space kernel ridge solver. The synthetic images are then updated by evaluating this induced classifier on real features through a temperature-scaled softmax cross-entropy, where the classifier columns act as learned class anchors in feature space. We further show that the choice of outer objective is decisive: pairing the closed-form inner solver with a standard MSE outer loss substantially underperforms trajectory-based methods, while the discriminative outer loss closes most of the gap. On ImageNet-100 with four pre-trained backbones, CLP-DD substantially improves over LGM without DSA and approaches LGM with DSA at a fraction of the computational cost. On ImageNet-1K, CLP-DD matches or surpasses LGM with DSA on three of four backbones while running roughly $14\times$ faster and using less than one-eighth of the GPU memory.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07194
Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is among the musculoskeletal disorders that considerably restrict joint mobility, cause severe chronic pain and impact negatively on quality life. It is one of the persistent health issues worldwide. Generally, subjectivity and inter-observer variability undermine conventional practices and evaluation process that are adopted to address such health issues. Hence precise and timely diagnosis would be one of the effective ways for the assessment of its severity. This paper proposes an automated diagnostic approach for severity grading of KOA by blending a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) with a device-based inference platform powered by TensorFlow Lite. It proposes a model based on the ResNet-18 convolutional neural network. The designed model is trained on publicly available database. Through a transfer learning approach obtained knee images are first classified into five Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) grades. Further the developed model is optimised. During the training of the model test accuracy of 94.48% with stable convergence has been achieved. Subsequently the optimised model transformed into a lightweight TensorFlow Lite format, facilitating seamless deployment on resource-constrained devices. The designed model is capable enough to operate in the environment having no continuous internet connectivity. Also, an auxiliary Large Language Model (Gemini-2.0-flash) is applied to generate structured interpretive findings like potential symptoms, risk factors, and preventive majors etc. The LLM component functions as interface without influencing the classification process. The proposed model articulates the feasibility of an on-device, interpretable decision-support tools for early diagnosis and improve accessibility to Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted knee screening tool.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05731
Transfer learning in reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to accelerate learning in new tasks by leveraging knowledge from related sources. Existing neurosymbolic transfer methods, however, typically rely on manually specified task automata, assume a single source task, and use fixed knowledge-integration mechanisms that cannot adapt to varying source relevance. We propose LANTERN, a unified framework for multi-source neurosymbolic transfer that addresses these limitations through three components: (i) deterministic finite automata generated from natural language task descriptions using large language models, (ii) semantic embedding-based aggregation of multiple source policies weighted by cross-task similarity, and (iii) adaptive teacher-student gating based on temporal-difference error and semantic uncertainty. Across domains spanning resource management, navigation, and control, LANTERN achieves 40-60% improvements in sample efficiency over existing baselines while remaining robust to poorly aligned sources. These results demonstrate that multi-source, adaptively weighted neurosymbolic transfer can improve scalability and robustness in symbolic RL settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05478
Deep learning models for medical image classification usually achieve promising results but typically rely on large, annotated datasets or standard transfer learning from ImageNet. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful alternative, yet common methods like masked autoencoders (MAEs) may inadvertently destroy fine-grained diagnostic features by using random masking. In this paper, we propose a novel SSL pre-training strategy, the Chaotic Denoising Autoencoder (CDAE). Instead of masking, we apply a chaotic transformation to the input image, tasking an autoencoder to reconstruct the original. We hypothesize this forces the encoder to learn robust, domain-specific features by "inverting the chaos". Furthermore, we propose an attentive fusion mechanism that combines features from our CDAE-trained encoder with a standard encoder, leveraging the strengths of both general and domain-specific representations. Our method is evaluated on two public medical datasets: ISIC 2018 (skin lesions) and APTOS 2019 (diabetic retinopathy). The proposed model achieves high performance, with an accuracy of 0.9221 and an F1-macro of 0.8530 on ISIC 2018, and an accuracy of 0.8644 and F1-macro of 0.7433 on APTOS 2019, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04985
Distributed collaborative intelligence (DCI), encompassing edge-to-edge architectures, federated learning, transfer learning, and swarm systems, creates environments in which emergent risk is structurally unavoidable: locally correct decisions by individual agents compose into globally unacceptable behavioral trajectories under uncertainty. Existing approaches such as constrained optimization, safe reinforcement learning, and runtime assurance evaluate acceptability at the level of individual actions rather than across behavioral trajectories, and none addresses the multi-participant, uncertainty-laden nature of DCI deployments. This paper introduces mechanical conscience (MC), a novel concept and simplified mathematical framework that operationalizes trajectory-level normative regulation for both single-agent and distributed intelligent systems. Mechanical conscience is defined as a supervisory filter that minimally corrects a baseline policy's actions to reduce cumulative deviation from a normatively admissible region, while accounting for epistemic uncertainty. We introduce associated constructs, conscience score, mechanical guilt, and resonant dependability, that provide an interpretable vocabulary and computable governance signals for this emerging field. Core theoretical properties are established: admissibility equivalence, existence of optimal regulation, and monotonic deviation reduction. Illustrative results demonstrate that MC-regulated agents maintain trajectory-level normative acceptability where conventional controllers drift outside admissible bounds, and that the framework naturally extends to suppress interaction-induced emergent risk in multi-agent DCI settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03847
Labeling medical images is a major bottleneck in the field of medical imaging, as it requires domain-specific expertise, and it gets further complicated due to variability across different medical centers and different imaging devices. Such heterogeneity introduces domain shifts and modality discrepancies, which limits the generalization of trained models. To address this important challenge, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation framework that combines transfer learning with a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space based Maximum Mean Discrepancy loss for the alignment of source and target domains. By jointly optimizing classification and RKHS-MMD losses, the methodology enhances generalization to unannotated medical datasets while diminishing reliance on manual annotation. Experimental evaluations presented on two chest X-ray datasets, which are obtained from different medical centers, show outstanding improvements over models trained without adaptation. Furthermore, we perform a comparative study to see that RKHS-MMD performs better than the standard Maximum Mean Discrepancy in reducing modality gap, emphasizing its effectiveness for medical image classification and also its strong capability in advanced AI-driven medical diagnostics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03787
The increasing availability of advanced image editing tools has led to a significant rise in manipulated digital content, posing serious challenges for digital forensics and information security. This study presents a transfer learning-based framework for digital image forgery detection that integrates compression-aware feature enhancement with deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. The proposed approach introduces a hybrid input representation that combines RGB images with compression difference-based features (FDIFF), explicitly highlighting subtle manipulation artifacts that are often difficult to detect. In addition, a model-specific adaptive threshold optimization strategy based on the Youden Index is employed to improve classification reliability by achieving a better balance between true positive and false positive rates. Experiments conducted on the CASIA v2.0 dataset using multiple pretrained CNN architectures, including DenseNet121, VGG16, ResNet50, EfficientNetB0, MobileNet, and InceptionV3, demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. The models are evaluated using comprehensive performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), and area under the ROC curve (AUC). The results show that DenseNet121 achieves the highest accuracy and AUC, while ResNet50 provides the most balanced and reliable predictions with the highest MCC. The findings emphasize that relying solely on accuracy is insufficient for forensic applications, where minimizing false negatives is critical. Overall, the proposed framework improves the visibility of manipulation artifacts and enhances classification robustness, making it suitable for real-world digital image forgery detection scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08167
Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) can collect point clouds across large areas, enabling large-scale forest inventory. However, ALS point clouds are sparse and noisy, resulting in inaccurate individual-tree-level forest inventory, such as stem localization and tree size estimation. To overcome this problem, we propose a deep learning model, 3D Forest Super Resolution (3DFSR), to simultaneously improve point density and reduce noise for ALS forest point cloud. 3DFSR is a voxel-based CNN with a U-Net architecture. The proposed 3DFSR is evaluated on ALS point clouds collected in both temperate forests in the U.S. and boreal forests in Germany. Experimental results demonstrate that 3DFSR can generate finer point clouds of tree structure than other state-of-the-art point cloud super-resolution algorithms, achieving 0.249 m Chamfer Distance and 2.711 m Hausdorff Distance. Furthermore, to verify the effectiveness of 3DFSR point clouds in forest inventory, we conduct stem detection, DBH measurements, and stem reconstruction on both original ALS point clouds and 3DFSR enhanced point clouds. We find that stem detection and reconstruction algorithms developed for TLS/MLS point clouds can directly work on our 3DFSR point clouds, and DBH can be derived with circle-fitting method. F1 score of stem detection is improved from 0.71 on original ALS point clouds to 0.97 on 3DFSR point clouds; DBH estimation improves from 13.45 cm RMSE using allometric equations to 6.43 cm using circle fitting; comparing to stems reconstruction from MLS point clouds, stem reconstructed from 3DFSR point clouds has 0.170 m of Chamfer Distance and 0.377 m of Hausdorff Distance, and 0.95 R2 volume estimation. Finally, we find that the proposed 3DFSR is applicable to process point densities from 10 to 1700 points/m2; it also can be generalized across data collected from different LiDAR platforms without transfer learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02201
We propose a unified cross-domain transfer learning framework that leverages knowledge from multiple heterogeneous medical imaging datasets to improve performance across segmentation, classification, and object detection tasks. Our approach employs a teacher-student paradigm in which a joint teacher model aggregates domain-invariant representations learned from diverse source datasets, while a task-specific student model is trained via multi-level knowledge distillation. Originally developed for medical image segmentation, the framework is extended to support image-level classification and object-level detection, enabling a general multi-task formulation for medical image analysis. We evaluate our method on a broad suite of datasets, including six segmentation benchmarks, BrainMetShare, ISLES, BraTS (MRI) and Lung MSD, LiTS, KiTS (CT), as well as multiple classification datasets for pulmonary disease and dementia, and detection datasets with native bounding-box annotations. Across all tasks and modalities, the proposed approach yields consistent improvements over strong dataset-specific and multi-head baselines, demonstrating enhanced robustness to distributional shifts and superior generalization. These findings highlight the potential of multi-dataset knowledge distillation as a scalable and task-agnostic approach for enhancing segmentation, classification, and object detection performance across heterogeneous medical imaging domains.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01563
Masked Language Modeling (MLM) pre-training is one of the primary ways to initialize Neural Information Retrieval (IR) models prior to retrieval fine-tuning. However, studies show that MLM pre-trained models have limited readiness and transfer learning issues for fine-tuning them into Neural Bi-Encoder models. This paper studies the effect of different pre-training datasets and pre-training options on the MLM pre-trained models for retrieval fine-tuning. The study focuses on the SPLADE-style model, which uses the MLM layer also at fine-tuning time. More specifically, we experimented with Expanded-SPLADE (ESPLADE) models, a specific instance of SPLADE models, and in-house web document titles are used as datasets. Pre-training, fine-tuning, and evaluation with optional test-time pruning of sparse vectors are conducted. Our observations are three-fold: First, fine-tuned models of higher retrieval effectiveness at both unpruned and most strict pruned settings are mostly pre-trained on a general corpus, and pre-trained with a higher learning rate, showing lower MLM accuracies. Second, in the most strict pruned setting, those models show higher-level retrieval cost and a higher variance in the length of the individual postings list. Third, the repetition of the general pre-training dataset does not have much effect on retrieval effectiveness. The experimentation empirically identifies the potential limitations for aligning MLM pre-training to ESPLADE fine-tuning. Also, the experimentation provides an empirical observation that, at most strict pruned settings, the retrieval effectiveness is better maintained by the higher-level retrieval cost, showing the trade-off relationship between the two in our setting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01407
The Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm presents a compelling, bio-inspired alternative to backpropagation. However, while efficient in training, it has a computationally prohibitive inference process that requires a separate forward pass for every class that is evaluated. In this work, we introduce the Hyperspherical Forward-Forward (HFF), a novel reformulation that resolves this critical bottleneck. Our core innovation is to reframe the local objective of each layer from a binary goodness-of-fit task to a direct multi-class classification problem within a hyperspherical feature space. We achieve this by learning a set of class-specific, unit-norm prototypes that act as geometric anchors and implicit negatives. This architectural innovation preserves the benefits of local training while enabling weight update and inference in a single forward pass, making it >40x faster than the original FF algorithm. Our method is simple to implement, scales effectively to modern convolutional architectures, and achieves superior accuracy on standard image classification benchmarks, closing the gap with backpropagation. Most notably, we are among the first greedy local-learning methods to report over 25% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k, and 65.96% with transfer learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00082
Learning rate scheduling has evolved from the single global fixed rate of early SGD to sophisticated layer-wise adaptive strategies. We systematize this evolution into five generations: (Gen1) global fixed learning rates, (Gen2) global scheduling, (Gen3) parameter-level adaptation, (Gen4) layer-level differentiation, and (Gen5) joint layer-time scheduling. We trace the fundamental motivation behind each transition, showing how the shift from one-size-fits-all to tailoring by layer and time addresses the impossible trinity of transfer learning: lower layers require small updates to preserve general knowledge while higher layers need large updates to adapt to new tasks. Building on this taxonomy, we propose Discriminative Adaptive Layer Scaling (DALS), a unified framework that integrates phase-adaptive cosine scheduling, depth-aware Grokfast gradient filtering, and LARS-style trust ratios into a single coherent optimizer. We benchmark 18 strategies including three DALS variants across all five generations on five datasets: synthetic, CIFAR-10 (from scratch), RTE, TREC-6, and IMDb (fine-tuning). On synthetic, DALS achieves the best accuracy at 98.0%, while DALS-Fast reaches 90% in just 3 epochs. The cross-dataset analysis reveals striking regime-dependent patterns -- no single strategy wins across all regimes. Critically, STLR+Discriminative, the ULMFiT champion, catastrophically fails on from-scratch tasks (43.6% on TREC-6 from scratch vs. 96.8% with RAdam), confirming that directional decay biases are harmful without pretrained features. DALS avoids either extreme, achieving the best synthetic result while maintaining competitive fine-tuning performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27295