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1. Adversarial Learning for Multi-task Sequence Labeling with Attention Mechanism

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TASLP.2020.3013114  

   Wang, Yu; Li, Yun; Zhu, Ziye; Tong, Hanghang; Huang, Yue (April 2020, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing)

   null (Ed.)

   With the requirements of natural language applications, multi-task sequence labeling methods have some immediate benefits over the single-task sequence labeling methods. Recently, many state-of-the-art multi-task sequence labeling methods were proposed, while still many issues to be resolved including (C1) exploring a more general relationship between tasks, (C2) extracting the task-shared knowledge purely and (C3) merging the task-shared knowledge for each task appropriately. To address the above challenges, we propose MTAA , a symmetric multi-task sequence labeling model, which performs an arbitrary number of tasks simultaneously. Furthermore, MTAA extracts the shared knowledge among tasks by adversarial learning and integrates the proposed multi-representation fusion attention mechanism for merging feature representations. We evaluate MTAA on two widely used data sets: CoNLL2003 and OntoNotes5.0. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the latest methods on the named entity recognition and the syntactic chunking task by a large margin, and achieves state-of-the-art results on the part-of-speech tagging task. 

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2. Split-Brain Autoencoders: Unsupervised Learning by Cross-Channel Prediction

   Zhang, Richard; Isola, Phillip; Efros, Alexei (July 2017, IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition)

   We propose split-brain autoencoders, a straightforward modification of the traditional autoencoder architecture, for unsupervised representation learning. The method adds a split to the network, resulting in two disjoint sub-networks. Each sub-network is trained to perform a difficult task -- predicting one subset of the data channels from another. Together, the sub-networks extract features from the entire input signal. By forcing the network to solve cross-channel prediction tasks, we induce a representation within the network which transfers well to other, unseen tasks. This method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several large-scale transfer learning benchmarks. 

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3. "Good Robot! Now Watch This!": Repurposing Reinforcement Learning for Task-to-Task Transfer

   Hundt, Andrew; Murali, Aditya; Hubli, Priyanka; Liu, Ran; Gopalan, Nakul; Gombolay, Matthew; Hager, Gregory D. (October 2021, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)

   Aleksandra Faust, David Hsu (Ed.)

   Modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are not sample efficient to train on multi-step tasks in complex domains, impeding their wider deployment in the real world. We address this problem by leveraging the insight that RL models trained to complete one set of tasks can be repurposed to complete related tasks when given just a handful of demonstrations. Based upon this insight, we propose See-SPOT-Run (SSR), a new computational approach to robot learning that enables a robot to complete a variety of real robot tasks in novel problem domains without task-specific training. SSR uses pretrained RL models to create vectors that represent model, task, and action relevance in demonstration and test scenes. SSR then compares these vectors via our Cycle Consistency Distance (CCD) metric to determine the next action to take. SSR completes 58% more task steps and 20% more trials than a baseline few-shot learning method that requires task-specific training. SSR also achieves a four order of magnitude improvement in compute efficiency and a 20% to three order of magnitude improvement in sample efficiency compared to the baseline and to training RL models from scratch. To our knowledge, we are the first to address multi-step tasks from demonstration on a real robot without task-specific training, where both the visual input and action space output are high dimensional. Code is available in the supplement. 

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4. Multitask Peer Prediction With Task-dependent Strategies

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3543507.3583292  

   Zhang, Yichi; Schoenebeck, Grant (April 2023, ACM)

   Peer prediction aims to incentivize truthful reports from agents whose reports cannot be assessed with any objective ground truthful information. In the multi-task setting where each agent is asked multiple questions, a sequence of mechanisms have been proposed which are truthful — truth-telling is guaranteed to be an equilibrium, or even better, informed truthful — truth-telling is guaranteed to be one of the best-paid equilibria. However, these guarantees assume agents’ strategies are restricted to be task-independent: an agent’s report on a task is not affected by her information about other tasks. We provide the first discussion on how to design (informed) truthful mechanisms for task-dependent strategies, which allows the agents to report based on all her information on the assigned tasks. We call such stronger mechanisms (informed) omni-truthful. In particular, we propose the joint-disjoint task framework, a new paradigm which builds upon the previous penalty-bonus task framework. First, we show a natural reduction from mechanisms in the penalty-bonus task framework to mechanisms in the joint-disjoint task framework that maps every truthful mechanism to an omni-truthful mechanism. Such a reduction is non-trivial as we show that current penalty-bonus task mechanisms are not, in general, omni-truthful. Second, for a stronger truthful guarantee, we design the matching agreement (MA) mechanism which is informed omni-truthful. Finally, for the MA mechanism in the detail-free setting where no prior knowledge is assumed, we show how many tasks are required to (approximately) retain the truthful guarantees. 

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5. A Modulation Module for Multi-task Learning with Applications in Image Retrieval

   Zhao, Xiangyun; Li, Haoxiang; Shen, Xiaohui; Liang, Xiaodan; Wu, Ying (September 2018, Proc. European Conference on Computer Vision)

   Multi-task learning has been widely adopted in many computer vision tasks to improve overall computation efficiency or boost the performance of individual tasks, under the assumption that those tasks are correlated and complementary to each other. However, the relationships between the tasks are complicated in practice, especially when the number of involved tasks scales up. When two tasks are of weak relevance, they may compete or even distract each other during joint training of shared parameters, and as a consequence undermine the learning of all the tasks. This will raise destructive interference which decreases learning efficiency of shared parameters and lead to low quality loss local optimum w.r.t. shared parameters. To address the this problem, we propose a general modulation module, which can be inserted into any convolutional neural network architecture, to encourage the coupling and feature sharing of relevant tasks while disentangling the learning of irrelevant tasks with minor parameters addition. Equipped with this module, gradient directions from different tasks can be enforced to be consistent for those shared parameters, which benefits multi-task joint training. The module is end-to-end learnable without ad-hoc design for specific tasks, and can naturally handle many tasks at the same time. We apply our approach on two retrieval tasks, face retrieval on the CelebA dataset [1] and product retrieval on the UT-Zappos50K dataset [2, 3], and demonstrate its advantage over other multi-task learning methods in both accuracy and storage efficiency. 

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