skip to main content


Title: Disentangling Transfer and Interference in Multi-Domain Learning
Humans are incredibly good at transferring knowledge from one domain to another, enabling rapid learning of new tasks. Likewise, transfer learning has enabled enormous success in many computer vision problems using pretraining. However, the benefits of transfer in multi-domain learning, where a network learns multiple tasks defined by different datasets, has not been adequately studied. Learning multiple domains could be beneficial, or these domains could interfere with each other given limited network capacity. Understanding how deep neural networks of varied capacity facilitate transfer across inputs from different distributions is a critical step towards open world learning. In this work, we decipher the conditions where interference and knowledge transfer occur in multi-domain learning. We propose new metrics disentangling interference and transfer, set up experimental protocols, and examine the roles of network capacity, task grouping, and dynamic loss weighting in reducing interference and facilitating transfer.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1909696
NSF-PAR ID:
10350723
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
AAAI Workshop on Practical Deep Learning in the Wild (PracticalDL)
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. A key assumption in multi-task learning is that at the inference time the multi-task model only has access to a given data point but not to the data point’s labels from other tasks. This presents an opportunity to extend multi-task learning to utilize data point’s labels from other auxiliary tasks, and this way improves performance on the new task. Here we introduce a novel relational multi-task learning setting where we leverage data point labels from auxiliary tasks to make more accurate predictions on the new task. We develop MetaLink, where our key innovation is to build a knowledge graph that connects data points and tasks and thus allows us to leverage labels from auxiliary tasks. The knowledge graph consists of two types of nodes: (1) data nodes, where node features are data embeddings computed by the neural network, and (2) task nodes, with the last layer’s weights for each task as node features. The edges in this knowledge graph capture data-task relationships, and the edge label captures the label of a data point on a particular task. Under MetaLink, we reformulate the new task as a link label prediction problem between a data node and a task node. The MetaLink framework provides flexibility to model knowledge transfer from auxiliary task labels to the task of interest. We evaluate MetaLink on 6 benchmark datasets in both biochemical and vision domains. Experiments demonstrate that MetaLink can successfully utilize the relations among different tasks, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods under the proposed relational multi-task learning setting, with up to 27% improvement in ROC AUC. 
    more » « less
  2. By learning a sequence of tasks continually, an agent in continual learning (CL) can improve the learning performance of both a new task and `old' tasks by leveraging the forward knowledge transfer and the backward knowledge transfer, respectively. However, most existing CL methods focus on addressing catastrophic forgetting in neural networks by minimizing the modification of the learnt model for old tasks. This inevitably limits the backward knowledge transfer from the new task to the old tasks, because judicious model updates could possibly improve the learning performance of the old tasks as well. To tackle this problem, we first theoretically analyze the conditions under which updating the learnt model of old tasks could be beneficial for CL and also lead to backward knowledge transfer, based on the gradient projection onto the input subspaces of old tasks. Building on the theoretical analysis, we next develop a ContinUal learning method with Backward knowlEdge tRansfer (CUBER), for a fixed capacity neural network without data replay. In particular, CUBER first characterizes the task correlation to identify the positively correlated old tasks in a layer-wise manner, and then selectively modifies the learnt model of the old tasks when learning the new task. Experimental studies show that CUBER can even achieve positive backward knowledge transfer on several existing CL benchmarks for the first time without data replay, where the related baselines still suffer from catastrophic forgetting (negative backward knowledge transfer). The superior performance of CUBER on the backward knowledge transfer also leads to higher accuracy accordingly. 
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)
    Learning low-dimensional representations of graphs has facilitated the use of traditional machine learning techniques to solving classic network analysis tasks such as link prediction, node classification, community detection, etc. However, to date, the vast majority of these learning tasks are focused on traditional single-layer/unimodal networks and largely ignore the case of multiplex networks. A multiplex network is a suitable structure to model multi-dimensional real-world complex systems. It consists of multiple layers where each layer represents a different relationship among the network nodes. In this work, we propose MUNEM, a novel approach for learning a low-dimensional representation of a multiplex network using a triplet loss objective function. In our approach, we preserve the global structure of each layer, while at the same time fusing knowledge among different layers during the learning process. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method by testing and comparing on real-world multiplex networks from different domains, such as collaboration network, protein-protein interaction network, online social network. Finally, in order to deliberately examine the effect of our model’s parameters we conduct extensive experiments on synthetic multiplex networks. 
    more » « less
  4. Transfer learning refers to the transfer of knowledge or information from a relevant source domain to a target domain. However, most existing transfer learning theories and algorithms focus on IID tasks, where the source/target samples are assumed to be independent and identically distributed. Very little effort is devoted to theoretically studying the knowledge transferability on non-IID tasks, e.g., cross-network mining. To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose rigorous generalization bounds and algorithms for cross-network transfer learning from a source graph to a target graph. The crucial idea is to characterize the cross-network knowledge transferability from the perspective of the Weisfeiler-Lehman graph isomorphism test. To this end, we propose a novel Graph Subtree Discrepancy to measure the graph distribution shift between source and target graphs. Then the generalization error bounds on cross-network transfer learning, including both cross-network node classification and link prediction tasks, can be derived in terms of the source knowledge and the Graph Subtree Discrepancy across domains. This thereby motivates us to propose a generic graph adaptive network (GRADE) to minimize the distribution shift between source and target graphs for cross-network transfer learning. Experimental results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our GRADE framework on both cross-network node classification and cross-domain recommendation tasks.

     
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Human activity recognition (HAR) from wearable sensors data has become ubiquitous due to the widespread proliferation of IoT and wearable devices. However, recognizing human activity in heterogeneous environments, for example, with sensors of different models and make, across different persons and their on-body sensor placements introduces wide range discrepancies in the data distributions, and therefore, leads to an increased error margin. Transductive transfer learning techniques such as domain adaptation have been quite successful in mitigating the domain discrepancies between the source and target domain distributions without the costly target domain data annotations. However, little exploration has been done when multiple distinct source domains are present, and the optimum mapping to the target domain from each source is not apparent. In this paper, we propose a deep Multi-Source Adversarial Domain Adaptation (MSADA) framework that opportunistically helps select the most relevant feature representations from multiple source domains and establish such mappings to the target domain by learning the perplexity scores. We showcase that the learned mappings can actually reflect our prior knowledge on the semantic relationships between the domains, indicating that MSADA can be employed as a powerful tool for exploratory activity data analysis. We empirically demonstrate that our proposed multi-source domain adaptation approach achieves 2% improvement with OPPORTUNITY dataset (cross-person heterogeneity, 4 ADLs), whereas 13% improvement on DSADS dataset (cross-position heterogeneity, 10 ADLs and sports activities). 
    more » « less