When Does Bias Transfer in Transfer Learning?

Hadi Salman, Saachi Jain, Andrew Ilyas, Logan Engstrom, Eric Wong, Aleksander Madry

Primary Area: societal considerations including fairness, safety, privacy

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Keywords: fine-tuning, pre-training, inductive bias, transfer learning

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TL;DR: In this work, we explore the phenomenon of "bias transfer", or the tendency for biases of the source model to persist even after adapting the model to the target dataset.

Abstract: Using transfer learning to adapt a pre-trained "source model" to a downstream "target task" can dramatically increase performance with seemingly no downside. In this work, we demonstrate that there can exist a downside after all: bias transfer, or the tendency for biases of the source model to persist even after adapting the model to the target dataset. Through a combination of synthetic and natural experiments, we show that bias transfer both (a) arises in realistic settings (such as when pre-training on ImageNet or other standard datasets) and (b) can occur even when the target dataset is explicitly de-biased. As transfer-learned models are increasingly deployed in the real world, our work highlights the importance of understanding the limitations of pre-trained source models.

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Submission Number: 6947