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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kourdis, Rafael, Gordon-Hall, Gabriel, Gorinski, Philip John
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07769
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author Kourdis, Rafael
Gordon-Hall, Gabriel
Gorinski, Philip John
author_facet Kourdis, Rafael
Gordon-Hall, Gabriel
Gorinski, Philip John
contents Multitask Learning is a Machine Learning paradigm that aims to train a range of (usually related) tasks with the help of a shared model. While the goal is often to improve the joint performance of all training tasks, another approach is to focus on the performance of a specific target task, while treating the remaining ones as auxiliary data from which to possibly leverage positive transfer towards the target during training. In such settings, it becomes important to estimate the positive or negative influence auxiliary tasks will have on the target. While many ways have been proposed to estimate task weights before or during training they typically rely on heuristics or extensive search of the weighting space. We propose a novel method called $α$-Variable Importance Learning ($α$VIL) that is able to adjust task weights dynamically during model training, by making direct use of task-specific updates of the underlying model's parameters between training epochs. Experiments indicate that $α$VIL is able to outperform other Multitask Learning approaches in a variety of settings. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt at making direct use of model updates for task weight estimation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_07769
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle $α$VIL: Learning to Leverage Auxiliary Tasks for Multitask Learning
Kourdis, Rafael
Gordon-Hall, Gabriel
Gorinski, Philip John
Machine Learning
Multitask Learning is a Machine Learning paradigm that aims to train a range of (usually related) tasks with the help of a shared model. While the goal is often to improve the joint performance of all training tasks, another approach is to focus on the performance of a specific target task, while treating the remaining ones as auxiliary data from which to possibly leverage positive transfer towards the target during training. In such settings, it becomes important to estimate the positive or negative influence auxiliary tasks will have on the target. While many ways have been proposed to estimate task weights before or during training they typically rely on heuristics or extensive search of the weighting space. We propose a novel method called $α$-Variable Importance Learning ($α$VIL) that is able to adjust task weights dynamically during model training, by making direct use of task-specific updates of the underlying model's parameters between training epochs. Experiments indicate that $α$VIL is able to outperform other Multitask Learning approaches in a variety of settings. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt at making direct use of model updates for task weight estimation.
title $α$VIL: Learning to Leverage Auxiliary Tasks for Multitask Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07769