Aiforia® Create feature: transfer learning

Aiforia® Create is the ultimate tool for AI-powered image analysis. Let's dive into one of its most powerful features: transfer learning.

Master new tasks with transfer learning

Imagine you're learning to play a new sport, like tennis, after you’ve already mastered badminton. Many of your skills, like hand-eye coordination and footwork, are directly transferable. You don't have to start from scratch. Transfer learning applies this same principle to AI. Instead of training an AI model with random initialization, you use an existing, pre-trained model as a powerful starting point. This existing model has already learned to "see" and understand basic features in images, such as edges and shapes. You simply fine-tune it for your specific task.

How transfer learning works

When you start with a new AI model, its neural network weights are randomly initialized. Transfer learning, however, lets you import the weights from an existing model. This gives your new model a head start. The imported model's "learned knowledge" is then adjusted to fit your project. If your new task is very similar to the old one, the model can quickly and efficiently adapt, converging to an optimal solution much faster than a model initialized with random weights.

The unbeatable advantages

With transfer learning in Aiforia® Create, you'll experience significant benefits:

• Faster development: Training a deep learning model from scratch can take days on powerful hardware. Transfer learning drastically reduces this time, allowing for quicker development cycles and faster deployment of new features.
• Less data required: Building a comprehensive dataset is often the most challenging part of an image analysis project. Transfer learning enables achieving great performance with a much smaller dataset, as the model already has a head start.

• Improved performance: By leveraging the knowledge encoded in a model trained on a large dataset, often better performance is achievable on a specific task compared to training a smaller model from scratch on limited data.
• Reduced costs: Less training time means less computational power and, ultimately, lower costs.

With Aiforia® Create, you're in full control. Our platform allows you to adjust the retention rate in transfer learning. This gives you a dial to control how much the new model should resemble the old one. If you’re simply fine-tuning an existing model with new data, you can set a high retention rate. But if your new task is different, you can lower the retention rate to allow for greater adaptation.

Aiforia® Create supports transfer learning for semantic segmentation and object detection, making it a versatile tool for a wide range of image analysis tasks. You can select your transfer learning source from the published models within your subscription, provided that they meet basic compatibility criteria (e.g., matching layer type).

Get to know other Aiforia® Create features: 

• Annotation Assistant
• Object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation
• Foundation models
• Validation tools
• Multi-channel images and analysis