{"entity":{"id":"transfer-learning","kind":"term","name":"Transfer learning and the low-label regime","aka":["transfer learning","low-label regime","few labels","label-efficient","data-efficient learning","few-shot fine-tuning"],"tldr":"Transfer learning reuses what a model learned on one task or dataset to do better on a related task with few labels, the situation for almost every cancer outcome.","summary":"Transfer learning re-uses knowledge learned from a task to boost performance on a related task (Wikipedia). Its promise in oncology is the low-label regime: outcome labels number in the hundreds, so a model pretrained on unlabelled data should need fewer of them. The gain is largest with fifty to a few hundred labels and tends to vanish as labels grow, and it can be washed out entirely by widening the feature set, so claims should state the label count.","asOf":"2026-09-24","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_learning","links":[{"label":"Wikipedia","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_learning"}],"tags":["cansim-terms"],"related":["cancer-ai-vocabulary"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":["self-supervised-pretraining","fine-tuning-vs-frozen","zero-shot"],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":["Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/transfer-learning."],"provenance":{"editedBy":"OnCo CanSim terms wave (Wikipedia summaries, standards and project pages, GDC and FDA pages, Europe PMC)","editedOn":"2026-09-24","note":"CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme"},"category":"Methods and models"},"route":"/terms/transfer-learning/","neighbours":{"term":[{"id":"cancer-ai-vocabulary","kind":"term","name":"Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)","route":"/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/"},{"id":"fine-tuning-vs-frozen","kind":"term","name":"Fine-tuning versus frozen features, and LoRA","route":"/terms/fine-tuning-vs-frozen/"},{"id":"self-supervised-pretraining","kind":"term","name":"Self-supervised pretraining (SSL)","route":"/terms/self-supervised-pretraining/"},{"id":"zero-shot","kind":"term","name":"Zero-shot prediction","route":"/terms/zero-shot/"}]}}