AI Fundamentals

Transfer Learning

Transfer learning is an ML technique where a model pre-trained on large datasets is transferred to a new, more specific task. Instead of starting from zero, the model's existing knowledge serves as a starting point and is adapted with few domain-specific data — saving significant time, compute power, and data requirements.

Why does this matter?

Transfer learning democratizes AI: even without millions of training data points and GPU clusters, companies can deploy powerful AI models. A pre-trained model fine-tuned on your 1,000 industry-specific documents often delivers better results than a model trained from scratch on 100,000 generic data points.

How IJONIS uses this

Transfer learning is our standard approach: we start with foundation models (Llama, Mistral, BERT) and adapt them via fine-tuning to your use case. For text tasks, we use Hugging Face Transformers; for image processing, we leverage pre-trained vision models. This achieves production quality in weeks instead of months.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is transfer learning cheaper than training from scratch?
Training an LLM from scratch costs millions in compute. Transfer learning leverages this already-invested knowledge and adapts it with comparatively little effort — often a few GPU hours and several hundred example data points suffice for good results.
What tasks is transfer learning particularly suited for?
Wherever existing language knowledge or patterns are transferable: document classification, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, summarization. It works best when the new task resembles the original training domain — such as text-to-text tasks with language models.

Want to learn more?

Find out how we apply this technology for your business.