Towards Enabling Learnware to Handle Heterogeneous Feature Spaces

Peng Tan, Zhi-Hao Tan, Yuan Jiang, Zhi-Hua Zhou

Abstract: The learnware paradigm was recently proposed by Zhou (2016) with the wish of developing the learnware market to help users build models more efciently by reusing existing well-performed models rather than starting from scratch. Specifcally, a learnware in the learnware market is a well-performed pre-trained model with a specifcation describing its specialty and utility, and the market identifes helpful learnware(s) for the user’s task based on the specifcation. Recent studies have attempted to realize a homogeneous prototype learnware market initially through Reduced Kernel Mean Embedding (RKME) specifcation, which requires all models in the market to share the same feature space. However, this limits the application scope of the learnware paradigm because various pre-trained models are often obtained from diferent feature spaces in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we make the frst attempt to enable the learnware to handle heterogeneous feature spaces. We propose a more powerful specifcation to manage heterogeneous learnwares by integrating subspace learning in the specifcation design, along with a practical approach for identifying and reusing helpful learnwares for the user’s task. Empirical studies on both synthetic data and real-world tasks validate the efcacy of our approach.