Fast Fine-Tuning Using Curriculum Domain Adaptation

Lulan Shen, Ibtihel Amara, Ruofeng Li, Brett H. Meyer, Warren J. Gross, James J. Clark

Abstract: Current deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable accuracy in various downstream tasks. However, their training and fine-tuning are challenging due to several factors, such as limited computational resources, extended training and fine-tuning times, and over-fitting due to small datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a three-stage fast fine-tuning method that efficiently trains DNNs for edge devices. Our method combines curriculum learning and domain adaptation techniques to accelerate training while achieving comparable performance. First, we develop a data curriculum approach, which ranks the dataset according to difficulty and split it into the source domain (containing easy data) and the target domain (containing difficult data). Second, we adapt the pretrained model from the source domain to the target domain using an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method called Deep CORAL. Finally, we continue training the adapted model on the source domain with fewer epochs. Our method achieves high accuracy quickly on various modern neural network architectures and datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CINIC-10.