Provable Multi-Task Representation Learning by Two-Layer ReLU Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Collins, Liam, Hassani, Hamed, Soltanolkotabi, Mahdi, Mokhtari, Aryan, Shakkottai, Sanjay
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Collins, Liam
Hassani, Hamed
Soltanolkotabi, Mahdi
Mokhtari, Aryan
Shakkottai, Sanjay
author_facet Collins, Liam
Hassani, Hamed
Soltanolkotabi, Mahdi
Mokhtari, Aryan
Shakkottai, Sanjay
contents An increasingly popular machine learning paradigm is to pretrain a neural network (NN) on many tasks offline, then adapt it to downstream tasks, often by re-training only the last linear layer of the network. This approach yields strong downstream performance in a variety of contexts, demonstrating that multitask pretraining leads to effective feature learning. Although several recent theoretical studies have shown that shallow NNs learn meaningful features when either (i) they are trained on a {\em single} task or (ii) they are {\em linear}, very little is known about the closer-to-practice case of {\em nonlinear} NNs trained on {\em multiple} tasks. In this work, we present the first results proving that feature learning occurs during training with a nonlinear model on multiple tasks. Our key insight is that multi-task pretraining induces a pseudo-contrastive loss that favors representations that align points that typically have the same label across tasks. Using this observation, we show that when the tasks are binary classification tasks with labels depending on the projection of the data onto an $r$-dimensional subspace within the $d\gg r$-dimensional input space, a simple gradient-based multitask learning algorithm on a two-layer ReLU NN recovers this projection, allowing for generalization to downstream tasks with sample and neuron complexity independent of $d$. In contrast, we show that with high probability over the draw of a single task, training on this single task cannot guarantee to learn all $r$ ground-truth features.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_06887
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Provable Multi-Task Representation Learning by Two-Layer ReLU Neural Networks
Collins, Liam
Hassani, Hamed
Soltanolkotabi, Mahdi
Mokhtari, Aryan
Shakkottai, Sanjay
Machine Learning
An increasingly popular machine learning paradigm is to pretrain a neural network (NN) on many tasks offline, then adapt it to downstream tasks, often by re-training only the last linear layer of the network. This approach yields strong downstream performance in a variety of contexts, demonstrating that multitask pretraining leads to effective feature learning. Although several recent theoretical studies have shown that shallow NNs learn meaningful features when either (i) they are trained on a {\em single} task or (ii) they are {\em linear}, very little is known about the closer-to-practice case of {\em nonlinear} NNs trained on {\em multiple} tasks. In this work, we present the first results proving that feature learning occurs during training with a nonlinear model on multiple tasks. Our key insight is that multi-task pretraining induces a pseudo-contrastive loss that favors representations that align points that typically have the same label across tasks. Using this observation, we show that when the tasks are binary classification tasks with labels depending on the projection of the data onto an $r$-dimensional subspace within the $d\gg r$-dimensional input space, a simple gradient-based multitask learning algorithm on a two-layer ReLU NN recovers this projection, allowing for generalization to downstream tasks with sample and neuron complexity independent of $d$. In contrast, we show that with high probability over the draw of a single task, training on this single task cannot guarantee to learn all $r$ ground-truth features.
title Provable Multi-Task Representation Learning by Two-Layer ReLU Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06887