RADAR: Relative Angular Divergence Across Representations

Machine learning methods rely on data. However, gathering suitable data can be challenging due to availability constraints, cost, or the need for domain expertise. Expanding datasets with additional sources is a common response to limited data, yet this practice does not always improve downstream performance and can sometimes lead to a loss of performance, known as negative transfer. We propose RADAR, a simple, geometrically grounded metric for estimating cross-domain transferability in foundation models. RADAR analyzes the layer-wise evolution of representations by measuring angular alignments and relative changes in distance along layer-to-layer displacement trajectories, and by comparing empirical distributions of within-domain and cross-domain dynamics. We hypothesize that domain transferability is related to the divergence between these trajectory distributions. We evaluate the metric across multiple modalities, including cross-lingual sentiment classification with text embedding models and cross-domain image classification with foundation vision models. Across several settings, RADAR provides competitive predictive performance relative to existing transferability metrics on several vision and text benchmarks, with particularly strong results when domain transitions are smooth or cleanly separated. Our ablations further suggest that the effectiveness of transferability estimation depends on the geometry of the model’s internal representation space, with different modalities favoring different topological formulations.