Identifying Task Groupings for Multi-Task Learning Using Pointwise V-Usable Information

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Yingya, Miller, Timothy, Bethard, Steven, Savova, Guergana
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Li, Yingya
Miller, Timothy
Bethard, Steven
Savova, Guergana
author_facet Li, Yingya
Miller, Timothy
Bethard, Steven
Savova, Guergana
contents The success of multi-task learning can depend heavily on which tasks are grouped together. Naively grouping all tasks or a random set of tasks can result in negative transfer, with the multi-task models performing worse than single-task models. Though many efforts have been made to identify task groupings and to measure the relatedness among different tasks, it remains a challenging research topic to define a metric to identify the best task grouping out of a pool of many potential task combinations. We propose a metric of task relatedness based on task difficulty measured by pointwise V-usable information (PVI). PVI is a recently proposed metric to estimate how much usable information a dataset contains given a model. We hypothesize that tasks with not statistically different PVI estimates are similar enough to benefit from the joint learning process. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the feasibility of this metric for task grouping on 15 NLP datasets in the general, biomedical, and clinical domains. We compare the results of the joint learners against single learners, existing baseline methods, and recent large language models, including Llama 2 and GPT-4. The results show that by grouping tasks with similar PVI estimates, the joint learners yielded competitive results with fewer total parameters, with consistent performance across domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_12774
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Identifying Task Groupings for Multi-Task Learning Using Pointwise V-Usable Information
Li, Yingya
Miller, Timothy
Bethard, Steven
Savova, Guergana
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The success of multi-task learning can depend heavily on which tasks are grouped together. Naively grouping all tasks or a random set of tasks can result in negative transfer, with the multi-task models performing worse than single-task models. Though many efforts have been made to identify task groupings and to measure the relatedness among different tasks, it remains a challenging research topic to define a metric to identify the best task grouping out of a pool of many potential task combinations. We propose a metric of task relatedness based on task difficulty measured by pointwise V-usable information (PVI). PVI is a recently proposed metric to estimate how much usable information a dataset contains given a model. We hypothesize that tasks with not statistically different PVI estimates are similar enough to benefit from the joint learning process. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the feasibility of this metric for task grouping on 15 NLP datasets in the general, biomedical, and clinical domains. We compare the results of the joint learners against single learners, existing baseline methods, and recent large language models, including Llama 2 and GPT-4. The results show that by grouping tasks with similar PVI estimates, the joint learners yielded competitive results with fewer total parameters, with consistent performance across domains.
title Identifying Task Groupings for Multi-Task Learning Using Pointwise V-Usable Information
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12774