Self-Paced Multitask Learning with Shared Knowledge

This paper introduces self-paced task selection to multitask learning, where instances from more closely related tasks are selected in a progression of easier-to-harder tasks, to emulate an effective human education strategy, but applied to multitask machine learning. We develop the mathematical foundation for the approach based on iterative selection of the most appropriate task, learning the task parameters, and updating the shared knowledge, optimizing a new bi-convex loss function. This proposed method applies quite generally, including to multitask feature learning, multitask learning with alternating structure optimization, etc. Results show that in each of the above formulations self-paced (easier-to-harder) task selection outperforms the baseline version of these methods in all the experiments

The Benefit of Multitask Representation Learning

We discuss a general method to learn data representations from multiple tasks. We provide a justification for this method in both settings of multitask learning and learning-to-learn. The method is illustrated in detail in the special case of linear feature learning. Conditions on the theoretical advantage offered by multitask representation learning over independent task learning are established. In particular, focusing on the important example of half-space learning, we derive the regime in which multitask representation learning is beneficial over independent task learning, as a function of the sample size, the number of tasks and the intrinsic data dimensionality. Other potential applications of our results include multitask feature learning in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and multilayer, deep networks.Comment: To appear in Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). 31 page

Latent Multi-task Architecture Learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) allows deep neural networks to learn from related tasks by sharing parameters with other networks. In practice, however, MTL involves searching an enormous space of possible parameter sharing architectures to find (a) the layers or subspaces that benefit from sharing, (b) the appropriate amount of sharing, and (c) the appropriate relative weights of the different task losses. Recent work has addressed each of the above problems in isolation. In this work we present an approach that learns a latent multi-task architecture that jointly addresses (a)--(c). We present experiments on synthetic data and data from OntoNotes 5.0, including four different tasks and seven different domains. Our extension consistently outperforms previous approaches to learning latent architectures for multi-task problems and achieves up to 15% average error reductions over common approaches to MTL.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of AAAI 201