Definition of "pretrain"

pretrain

verb
third-person singular simple present pretrains, present participle pretraining, simple past and past participle pretrained
1. (machine learning) 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.
  Quotations
  Our algorithm pretrains a CNN using a large set of videos with tracking ground-truths to obtain a generic target representation.
  2015, Hyeonseob Nam, Bohyung Han, “Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking”, in arXiv‎