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Abstract:Pretraining and fine-tuning are central stages in modern machine learning systems. In practice, feature learning plays an important role across both stages: deep neural networks learn a broad range of useful features during pretraining and further refine those features during fine-tuning. However, an end-to-end theoretical understanding of how choices of initialization impact the ability to reuse and refine features during fine-tuning has remained elusive. Here we develop an analytical theory of the pretraining fine-tuning pipeline in diagonal linear networks, deriving exact expressions for the generalization error as a function of initialization parameters and task statistics. We find that different initialization choices place the network into four distinct fine-tuning regimes that are distinguished by their ability to support feature learning and reuse and therefore by the task statistics for which they are beneficial. In particular, a smaller initialization scale in earlier layers enables the network to both reuse and refine its features, leading to superior generalization on fine-tuning tasks that rely on a subset of pretraining features. We demonstrate empirically that the same initialization parameters impact generalization in ResNets trained on CIFAR-100 and SVHN as well as Transformers trained on modular arithmetic tasks. Overall, our results demonstrate an alytically how data and network initialization interact to shape fine-tuning generalization, highlighting an important role for the relative scale of initialization across different layers in enabling continued feature learning during fine-tuning.

Submission history

From: Nicolas Anguita [view email]
[v1] Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:19:33 UTC (14,135 KB)
[v2] Tue, 30 Jun 2026 08:25:25 UTC (15,927 KB)