Papers › When does Bias Transfer in Transfer Learning?

When does Bias Transfer in Transfer Learning?

6 Jul 2022arXiv:2207.02842archive 2025-07-28

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

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 class. 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. Code is available at https://github.com/MadryLab/bias-transfer

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