This repo contains the code for the following paper:

Behnam Neyshabur*, Hanie Sedghi*, Chiyuan Zhang*. What is being transferred in transfer learning?. *equal contribution. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020.

Disclaimer: this is not an officially supported Google product.

This code has the following dependencies

• pytorch (1.4.0 is tested)
• gin-config
• tqdm
• wget (the python package)

GPUs are needed to run most of the experiments.

CheXpert data (the train and valid folders) needs to be placed in /mnt/data/CheXpert-v1.0-img224. If your data is in a different place, you can specify the data.image_path parameter (see configs/p100_chexpert.py). We pre-resized all the CheXpert images to reduce the burden of data pre-processing using the following script:

#!/bin/bash

NEWDIR=CheXpert-v1.0-img224
mkdir -p $NEWDIR/{train,valid}

cd CheXpert-v1.0

echo "Prepare directory structure..."
find . -type d | parallel mkdir -p ../$NEWDIR/{}

echo "Resize all images to have at least 224 pixels on each side..."
find . -name "*.jpg" | parallel convert {} -resize "'224^>'" ../$NEWDIR/{}

cd ..

The DomainNet data will be automatically downloaded from the Internet upon first run. By default, it will download to /mnt/data, which can be changed with the data_dir config (see configs/p100_domain_net.py).

CheXpert training from random init. We use 2 Nvidia V100 GPUs for CheXpert training. If you run into out-of-memory error, you can try to reduce the batch size.

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1 python chexpert_train.py -k train/chexpert/fixup_resnet50_nzfc/randinit-lr0.1-bs256

CheXpert finetuning from ImageNet pre-trained checkpoint. The code tries to load the ImageNet pre-trained chexpoint from /mnt/data/logs/imagenet-lr01/ckpt-E090.pth.tar. Or you can customize the path to checkpoint (see configs/p100_chexpert.py).

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1 python chexpert_train.py -k train/chexpert/fixup_resnet50_nzfc/finetune-lr0.02-bs256

Similarly, DomainNet training can be executed using the script imagenet_train.py (replace real with clipart and quickdraw to run on different domains).

# randinit
CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python imagenet_train.py -k train/DomainNet_real/fixup_resnet50_nzfc/randinit-lr0.1-MstepLR

# finetune
CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python imagenet_train.py -k train/DomainNet_real/fixup_resnet50_nzfc/finetune-lr0.02-MstepLR

The training jobs with block-shuffled images are defined in configs/p200_pix_shuffle.py. Run

python -m configs pix_shuffle

To see the keys of all the training jobs with pixel shuffling. Similarly,

python -m configs blk7_shuffle

list all the jobs with 7x7 block-shuffled images. You can run any of those jobs using the -k command line argument. For example:

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python imagenet_train.py \
    -k blk7_shuffle/DomainNet_quickdraw/fixup_resnet50_nzfc_noaug/randinit-lr0.1-MstepLR/seed0

The config file configs/p200_finetune_ckpt.py defines training jobs that finetune from different ImageNet pre-training checkpoints along the pre-training optimization trajectory.

The script ckpt_interpolation.py performs the experiment of linearly interpolating between different solutions. The file is self-contained. You can edit the file directly to specify which combinations of checkpoints are to be used. The command line argument -a compute and -a plot can be used to switch between doing the computation and making the plots based on computed results.

This codebase uses gin-config to customize the behavior of the program, and allows us to easily generate a large number of similar configurations with Python loops. This is especially useful for hyper-parameter sweeps.

A script mainly takes a config key in the commandline, and it will pull the detailed configurations according to this key from the pre-defined configs. For example:

python3 imagenet_train.py -k train/cifar10/fixup_resnet50/finetune-lr0.02-MstepLR

You can list all the pre-defined config keys matching a given regex with the following command:

python3 -m configs <regex>

For example:

$ python3 -m configs cifar10
2 configs found ====== with regex: cifar10
    0) train/cifar10/fixup_resnet50/randinit-lr0.1-MstepLR
    1) train/cifar10/fixup_resnet50/finetune-lr0.02-MstepLR

All the configs are in the directory configs, with the naming convention pXXX_YYY.py. Here XXX are digits, which allows ordering between configs (so when defining configs we can reference and extend previously defined configs).

To add a new config file:

1. create pXXX_YYY.py file.
2. edit __init__.py to import this file.
3. in the newly added file, define functions to registery new configs. All the functions with the name register_blah will be automatically called.

To customize the behavior of a new function, make that function gin configurable by

@gin.configurable('config_name')
def my_func(arg1=gin.REQUIRED, arg2=0):
  # blah

Then in the pre-defined config files, you can specify the values by

spec['gin']['config_name.arg1'] = # whatever python objects
spec['gin']['config_name.arg2'] = 2

See gin-config for more details.