Localizing Transfer Between Memorization Tasks

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.00771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central puzzle in transfer learning is why pre-training on one task can accelerate training or improve performance on another task, and what mechanisms underlie this transfer. In this work, we examine the transfer between memorization tasks of random input-output mappings. We find two surprising transfer patterns: equivalent transfer, where each additional pre-training epoch saves approximately one downstream fine-tuning epoch; and non-equivalent