What does "pretrain" mean?

To train (a neural network) on some data set (typically a large generic data set, the output of which one is not directly interested in) before fine-tuning the network on another dataset one is interested in.

Pretrain

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb

1
To train (a neural network) on some data set (typically a large generic data set, the output of which one is not directly interested in) before fine-tuning the network on another dataset one is interested in.
"Our algorithm pretrains a CNN using a large set of videos with tracking ground-truths to obtain a generic target representation."

Example

More examples

"Our algorithm pretrains a CNN using a large set of videos with tracking ground-truths to obtain a generic target representation."

Etymology

From pre- + train.

Related phrases

in advance

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.