Learning Boost by Exploiting the Auxiliary Task in Multi-task Domain

Abstract: Learning two tasks in a single shared function has some benefits. Firstly by acquiring information from the second task, the shared function leverages useful information that could have been neglected or underestimated in the first task. Secondly, it helps to generalize the function that can be learned using generally applicable information for both tasks. To fully enjoy these benefits, Multi-task Learning (MTL) has long been researched in various domains such as computer vision, language understanding, and speech synthesis. While MTL benefits from the positive transfer of information from multiple tasks, in a real environment, tasks inevitably have a conflict between them during the learning phase, called negative transfer. The negative transfer hampers function from achieving the optimality and degrades the performance. To solve the problem of the task conflict, previous works only suggested partial solutions that are not fundamental, but ad-hoc. A common approach is using a weighted sum of losses. The weights are adjusted to induce positive transfer. Paradoxically, this kind of solution acknowledges the problem of negative transfer and cannot remove it unless the weight of the task is set to zero. Therefore, these previous methods had limited success. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that can drive positive transfer and suppress negative transfer by leveraging class-wise weights in the learning process. The weights act as an arbitrator of the fundamental unit of information to determine its positive or negative status to the main task.