# Unleashing the power of Neural Collapse for Transferability Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05754 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05754/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [Prevalence of Neural Collapse during the terminal phase of deep learning training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08186/) (2020)
- [Large-Margin Softmax Loss for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02295/) (2016)
- [CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05986/) (2020)
- [Highway Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00387/) (2015)
- [A Geometric Analysis of Neural Collapse with Unconstrained Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02375/) (2021)
- [LEEP: A New Measure to Evaluate Transferability of Learned Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12462/) (2020)
- [LogME: Practical Assessment of Pre-trained Models for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11005/) (2021)
- [Transferability and Hardness of Supervised Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08142/) (2019)
- [Look into Person: Self-supervised Structure-sensitive Learning and A New Benchmark for Human Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05446/) (2017)
- [Extended Unconstrained Features Model for Exploring Deep Neural Collapse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08087/) (2022)
- [Agreement-on-the-Line: Predicting the Performance of Neural Networks under Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13089/) (2022)
- [An Information-Theoretic Approach to Transferability in Task Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10082/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Which Model to Transfer? A Survey on Transferability Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15231/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transferability estimation aims to provide heuristics for quantifying how suitable a pre-trained model is for a specific downstream task, without fine-tuning them all. Prior studies have revealed that well-trained models exhibit the phenomenon of Neural Collapse. Based on a widely used neural collapse metric in existing literature, we observe a strong correlation between the neural collapse of pre-trained models and their corresponding fine-tuned models. Inspired by this observation, we propose a novel method termed Fair Collapse (FaCe) for transferability estimation by comprehensively measuring the degree of neural collapse in the pre-trained model. Typically, FaCe comprises two different terms: the variance collapse term, which assesses the class separation and within-class compactness, and the class fairness term, which quantifies the fairness of the pre-trained model towards each class. We investigate FaCe on a variety of pre-trained classification models across different network architectures, source datasets, and training loss functions. Results show that FaCe yields state-of-the-art performance on different tasks including image classification, semantic segmentation, and text classification, which demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our method.
