LEEP: A New Measure to Evaluate Transferability of Learned Representations

Abstract

We introduce a new measure to evaluate the transferability of representations learned by classifiers. Our measure, the Log Expected Empirical Prediction (LEEP), is simple and easy to compute: when given a classifier trained on a source dataset, it only requires running the target dataset through this classifier once. We analyze the properties of LEEP theoretically and demonstrate its effectiveness empirically. Our analysis shows that LEEP can predict the performance and convergence speed of both transfer and meta-transfer learning methods, even for small or imbalanced data. Moreover, LEEP outperforms recently proposed transferability measures such as negative conditional entropy and H scores. Notably, when transferring from ImageNet to CIFAR100, LEEP can achieve up to 30% improvement compared to the best competing method in terms of the correlations with actual transfer accuracy.