Cross-Domain Agents

Design agents that transfer knowledge across different domains

The Universal Agent Challenge

Training an AI agent from scratch for every new domain is expensive and slow. Cross-domain agents solve this by transferring knowledge learned in one domain to excel in another. A customer support agent becomes a medical diagnostician. A financial analyst becomes a legal document reviewer. Same core intelligence, different application.

Why Cross-Domain Transfer Matters

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Cost Reduction
Training from scratch: $50K-$500K per domain. Transfer learning: $5K-$50K (90% savings)
Speed to Production
From-scratch: 4-8 months. Transfer: 2-4 weeks (10x faster deployment)
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Better Performance
Cold start: 60-70% accuracy. Warm start with transfer: 75-85% accuracy
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Knowledge Reuse
Core reasoning, language understanding, and problem-solving transfer across domains

Interactive: Domain Transfer Explorer

See how agents transfer knowledge from one domain to another:

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Medical Diagnosis
Cross-Domain Transfer Example
Source Agent:
Customer Support Agent
Transferred:
Question-Answer Pattern
Accuracy Gain:
78% → 85%
Adaptation:
Medical terminology + diagnostic reasoning
Time Saved:
6 months training → 2 weeks fine-tuning
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What Makes Knowledge Transferable?
  • Shared Abstractions: Question-answering, classification, sequence prediction work everywhere
  • Universal Patterns: Cause-effect reasoning, context understanding, decision-making logic
  • Learned Representations: Neural networks learn general features that apply across domains
  • Problem Structure: Many domains share underlying problem structures despite different terminology

The Transfer Learning Spectrum

Cross-domain transfer exists on a spectrum from easy to challenging:

Easy Transfer (80-90% knowledge reuse)
Similar domains: Customer support → Technical support, English NLP → Spanish NLP
Moderate Transfer (50-70% knowledge reuse)
Related domains: Text classification → Image classification, Recommendation → Personalization
Hard Transfer (30-50% knowledge reuse)
Different modalities: Text agent → Vision agent, Discrete → Continuous problems
Very Hard Transfer (10-30% knowledge reuse)
Opposite objectives: Generative → Discriminative, Single-step → Multi-step planning