1. to train (a machine learning model) on a large dataset before fine-tuning it for a specific task
Usage: technical; computing
2. to train (a person or animal) in advance or beforehand

Examples

• The company pretrains its language models on billions of words before adapting them for specific applications.
• Researchers pretrain neural networks on general image recognition tasks to improve performance on specialized datasets.
• The coach pretrains new athletes during the off-season to prepare them for competition.
• The model pretrains on diverse data to develop robust features that transfer well to downstream tasks.
• They pretrain employees on safety protocols before assigning them to the factory floor.