verb
- to train (a machine learning model) on a large dataset before fine-tuning it for a specific task
Usage: technical; computing
Examples
- Researchers pretrain large language models on billions of words from the internet.
- The model was pretrained on ImageNet before being adapted for medical image classification.
- Pretraining allows the neural network to learn general features that transfer well to new tasks.
- Companies often pretrain their models on generic data to reduce training time for specialized applications.
- The pretrained weights serve as a strong starting point for downstream tasks.