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While most studies recommend scaling the pre-training size to benefit most from transfer learning, a question remains: what data and method should be used for pre-training? We investigate the impact of pre-training data distribution on the few-shot and full fine-tuning performance using 3 pre-training methods (supervised, contrastive language-image and image-image), 7 pre-training datasets, and 9 downstream datasets. Through extensive controlled experiments, we find that the choice of the pre-training data source is essential for the few-shot transfer, but its role decreases as more data is made available for fine-tuning. Additionally, we explore the role of data curation and examine the trade-offs between label noise and the size of the pre-training dataset. We find that using 2000X more pre-training data from LAION can match the performance of supervised ImageNet pre-training. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of pre-training methods, comparing language-image contrastive vs. image-image contrastive, and find that the latter leads to better downstream accuracy","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.13602v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.13602v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-role-of-pre-training-data-in-transfer","repo_url":"https://github.com/anonymousmlsubmission/datadistributiontransfer","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"the-role-of-pre-training-data-in-transfer","repo_url":"https://github.com/rahimentezari/datadistributiontransferlearning","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2302.13602","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2302.13602","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2302.13602"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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