Asymmetric Multi-task Learning Based on Task Relatedness and Confidence

Abstract

We propose a novel multi-task learning method that minimizes the effect of negative transfer by allowing asymmetric transfer between the tasks based on task relatedness as well as the amount of individual task losses, which we refer to as Asymmetric Multi-task Learning (AMTL). To tackle this problem, we couple multiple tasks via a sparse, directed regularization graph, that enforces each task parameter to be reconstructed as a sparse combination of other tasks selected based on the task-wise loss. We present two different algorithms that jointly learn the task predictors as well as the regularization graph. The first algorithm solves for the original learning objective using alternative optimization, and the second algorithm solves an approximation of it using curriculum learning strategy, that learns one task at a time. We perform experiments on multiple datasets for classification and regression, on which we obtain significant improvements in performance over the single task learning and existing multitask learning models.