Policy optimization in reinforcement learning requires the selection of numerous hyperparameters across different environments. Fixing them incorrectly may negatively impact optimization performance leading notably to insufficient or redundant learning. Insufficient learning (due to convergence to local optima) results in under-performing policies whilst redundant learning wastes time and resources. The effects are further exacerbated when using single policies to solve multi-task learning problems. Observing that the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) used in Variational Auto-Encoders correlates with the diversity of image samples, we propose an auto-tuning technique based on the ELBO for self-supervised reinforcement learning. Our approach can auto-tune three hyperparameters: the replay buffer size, the number of policy gradient updates during each epoch, and the number of exploration steps during each epoch. We use a state-of-the-art self-supervised robot learning framework (Reinforcement Learning with Imagined Goals (RIG) using Soft Actor-Critic) as baseline for experimental verification. Experiments show that our method can auto-tune online and yields the best performance at a fraction of the time and computational resources. Code, video, and appendix for simulated and real-robot experiments can be found at the project page \url{www.JuanRojas.net/autotune}.
Although the prediction of dialects is an important language processing task, with a wide range of applications, existing work is largely limited to coarse-grained varieties. Inspired by geolocation research, we propose the novel task of Micro-Dialect Identification (MDI) and introduce MARBERT, a new language model with striking abilities to predict a fine-grained variety (as small as that of a city) given a single, short message. For modeling, we offer a range of novel spatially and linguistically-motivated multi-task learning models. To showcase the utility of our models, we introduce a new, large-scale dataset of Arabic micro-varieties (low-resource) suited to our tasks. MARBERT predicts micro-dialects with 9.9% F1, ~76X better than a majority class baseline. Our new language model also establishes new state-of-the-art on several external tasks.
We introduce fairseq S2T, a fairseq extension for speech-to-text (S2T) modeling tasks such as end-to-end speech recognition and speech-to-text translation. It follows fairseq's careful design for scalability and extensibility. We provide end-to-end workflows from data pre-processing, model training to offline (online) inference. We implement state-of-the-art RNN-based, Transformer-based as well as Conformer-based models and open-source detailed training recipes. Fairseq's machine translation models and language models can be seamlessly integrated into S2T workflows for multi-task learning or transfer learning. Fairseq S2T documentation and examples are available at https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/speech_to_text.
Multi-objective optimization (MOO) problems are prevalent in machine learning. These problems have a set of optimal solutions, called the Pareto front, where each point on the front represents a different trade-off between possibly conflicting objectives. Recent MOO methods can target a specific desired ray in loss space however, most approaches still face two grave limitations: (i) A separate model has to be trained for each point on the front; and (ii) The exact trade-off must be known before the optimization process. Here, we tackle the problem of learning the entire Pareto front, with the capability of selecting a desired operating point on the front after training. We call this new setup Pareto-Front Learning (PFL). We describe an approach to PFL implemented using HyperNetworks, which we term Pareto HyperNetworks (PHNs). PHN learns the entire Pareto front simultaneously using a single hypernetwork, which receives as input a desired preference vector and returns a Pareto-optimal model whose loss vector is in the desired ray. The unified model is runtime efficient compared to training multiple models and generalizes to new operating points not used during training. We evaluate our method on a wide set of problems, from multi-task regression and classification to fairness. PHNs learn the entire Pareto front at roughly the same time as learning a single point on the front and at the same time reach a better solution set. Furthermore, we show that PHNs can scale to generate large models like ResNet18. PFL opens the door to new applications where models are selected based on preferences that are only available at run time.
(T)ACSA tasks, including aspect-category sentiment analysis (ACSA) and targeted aspect-category sentiment analysis (TACSA), aims at identifying sentiment polarity on predefined categories. Incremental learning on new categories is necessary for (T)ACSA real applications. Though current multi-task learning models achieve good performance in (T)ACSA tasks, they suffer from catastrophic forgetting problems in (T)ACSA incremental learning tasks. In this paper, to make multi-task learning feasible for incremental learning, we proposed Category Name Embedding network (CNE-net). We set both encoder and decoder shared among all categories to weaken the catastrophic forgetting problem. Besides the origin input sentence, we applied another input feature, i.e., category name, for task discrimination. Our model achieved state-of-the-art on two (T)ACSA benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we proposed a dataset for (T)ACSA incremental learning and achieved the best performance compared with other strong baselines.
The state-of-the-art Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) approaches are mainly based on either detecting aspect terms and their corresponding sentiment polarities, or co-extracting aspect and opinion terms. However, the extraction of aspect-sentiment pairs lacks opinion terms as a reference, while co-extraction of aspect and opinion terms would not lead to meaningful pairs without determining their sentiment dependencies. To address the issue, we present a novel view of ABSA as an opinion triplet extraction task, and propose a multi-task learning framework to jointly extract aspect terms and opinion terms, and simultaneously parses sentiment dependencies between them with a biaffine scorer. At inference phase, the extraction of triplets is facilitated by a triplet decoding method based on the above outputs. We evaluate the proposed framework on four SemEval benchmarks for ASBA. The results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms a range of strong baselines and state-of-the-art approaches.
In the literature, the research on abstract meaning representation (AMR) parsing is much restricted by the size of human-curated dataset which is critical to build an AMR parser with good performance. To alleviate such data size restriction, pre-trained models have been drawing more and more attention in AMR parsing. However, previous pre-trained models, like BERT, are implemented for general purpose which may not work as expected for the specific task of AMR parsing. In this paper, we focus on sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) AMR parsing and propose a seq2seq pre-training approach to build pre-trained models in both single and joint way on three relevant tasks, i.e., machine translation, syntactic parsing, and AMR parsing itself. Moreover, we extend the vanilla fine-tuning method to a multi-task learning fine-tuning method that optimizes for the performance of AMR parsing while endeavors to preserve the response of pre-trained models. Extensive experimental results on two English benchmark datasets show that both the single and joint pre-trained models significantly improve the performance (e.g., from 71.5 to 80.2 on AMR 2.0), which reaches the state of the art. The result is very encouraging since we achieve this with seq2seq models rather than complex models. We make our code and model available at https://github.com/xdqkid/S2S-AMR-Parser.
We study the zero-shot transfer capabilities of text matching models on a massive scale, by self-supervised training on 140 source domains from community question answering forums in English. We investigate the model performances on nine benchmarks of answer selection and question similarity tasks, and show that all 140 models transfer surprisingly well, where the large majority of models substantially outperforms common IR baselines. We also demonstrate that considering a broad selection of source domains is crucial for obtaining the best zero-shot transfer performances, which contrasts the standard procedure that merely relies on the largest and most similar domains. In addition, we extensively study how to best combine multiple source domains. We propose to incorporate self-supervised with supervised multi-task learning on all available source domains. Our best zero-shot transfer model considerably outperforms in-domain BERT and the previous state of the art on six benchmarks. Fine-tuning of our model with in-domain data results in additional large gains and achieves the new state of the art on all nine benchmarks.
In recent years, deep learning-based methods have been successfully applied to the image distortion restoration tasks. However, scenarios that assume a single distortion only may not be suitable for many real-world applications. To deal with such cases, some studies have proposed sequentially combined distortions datasets. Viewing in a different point of combining, we introduce a spatially-heterogeneous distortion dataset in which multiple corruptions are applied to the different locations of each image. In addition, we also propose a mixture of experts network to effectively restore a multi-distortion image. Motivated by the multi-task learning, we design our network to have multiple paths that learn both common and distortion-specific representations. Our model is effective for restoring real-world distortions and we experimentally verify that our method outperforms other models designed to manage both single distortion and multiple distortions.
RRPN is among the outstanding scene text detection approaches, but the manually-designed anchor and coarse proposal refinement make the performance still far from perfection. In this paper, we propose RRPN++ to exploit the potential of RRPN-based model by several improvements. Based on RRPN, we propose the Anchor-free Pyramid Proposal Networks (APPN) to generate first-stage proposals, which adopts the anchor-free design to reduce proposal number and accelerate the inference speed. In our second stage, both the detection branch and the recognition branch are incorporated to perform multi-task learning. In inference stage, the detection branch outputs the proposal refinement and the recognition branch predicts the transcript of the refined text region. Further, the recognition branch also helps rescore the proposals and eliminate the false positive proposals by the jointing filtering strategy. With these enhancements, we boost the detection results by $6\%$ of F-measure in ICDAR2015 compared to RRPN. Experiments conducted on other benchmarks also illustrate the superior performance and efficiency of our model.
Obtaining annotations for 3D medical images is expensive and time-consuming, despite its importance for automating segmentation tasks. Although multi-task learning is considered an effective method for training segmentation models using small amounts of annotated data, a systematic understanding of various subtasks is still lacking. In this study, we propose a multi-task segmentation model with a contrastive learning based subtask and compare its performance with other multi-task models, varying the number of labeled data for training. We further extend our model so that it can utilize unlabeled data through the regularization branch in a semi-supervised manner. We experimentally show that our proposed method outperforms other multi-task methods including the state-of-the-art fully supervised model when the amount of annotated data is limited.
Multi-Task Learning (MTL) networks have emerged as a promising method for transferring learned knowledge across different tasks. However, MTL must deal with challenges such as: overfitting to low resource tasks, catastrophic forgetting, and negative task transfer, or learning interference. Often, in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a separate model per task is needed to obtain the best performance. However, many fine-tuning approaches are both parameter inefficient, i.e., potentially involving one new model per task, and highly susceptible to losing knowledge acquired during pretraining. We propose a novel Transformer architecture consisting of a new conditional attention mechanism as well as a set of task-conditioned modules that facilitate weight sharing. Through this construction (a hypernetwork adapter), we achieve more efficient parameter sharing and mitigate forgetting by keeping half of the weights of a pretrained model fixed. We also use a new multi-task data sampling strategy to mitigate the negative effects of data imbalance across tasks. Using this approach, we are able to surpass single task fine-tuning methods while being parameter and data efficient (using around 66% of the data for weight updates). Compared to other BERT Large methods on GLUE, our 8-task model surpasses other Adapter methods by 2.8% and our 24-task model outperforms by 0.7-1.0% models that use MTL and single task fine-tuning. We show that a larger variant of our single multi-task model approach performs competitively across 26 NLP tasks and yields state-of-the-art results on a number of test and development sets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/CAMTL/CA-MTL.
In recent years, several online platforms have seen a rapid increase in the number of review systems that request users to provide aspect-level feedback. Document-level Multi-aspect Sentiment Classification (DMSC), where the goal is to predict the ratings/sentiment from a review at an individual aspect level, has become a challenging and imminent problem. To tackle this challenge, we propose a deliberate self-attention-based deep neural network model, namely FEDAR, for the DMSC problem, which can achieve competitive performance while also being able to interpret the predictions made. FEDAR is equipped with a highway word embedding layer to transfer knowledge from pre-trained word embeddings, an RNN encoder layer with output features enriched by pooling and factorization techniques, and a deliberate self-attention layer. In addition, we also propose an Attention-driven Keywords Ranking (AKR) method, which can automatically discover aspect keywords and aspect-level opinion keywords from the review corpus based on the attention weights. These keywords are significant for rating predictions by FEDAR. Since crowdsourcing annotation can be an alternate way to recover missing ratings of reviews, we propose a LEcture-AuDience (LEAD) strategy to estimate model uncertainty in the context of multi-task learning, so that valuable human resources can focus on the most uncertain predictions. Our extensive set of experiments on five different open-domain DMSC datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed FEDAR and LEAD models. We further introduce two new DMSC datasets in the healthcare domain and benchmark different baseline models and our models on them. Attention weights visualization results and visualization of aspect and opinion keywords demonstrate the interpretability of our model and the effectiveness of our AKR method.
We propose a new test to measure a text model's multitask accuracy. The test covers 57 tasks including elementary mathematics, US history, computer science, law, and more. To attain high accuracy on this test, models must possess extensive world knowledge and problem solving ability. We find that while most recent models have near random-chance accuracy, the very largest GPT-3 model improves over random chance by almost 20 percentage points on average. However, on every one of the 57 tasks, the best models still need substantial improvements before they can reach expert-level accuracy. Models also have lopsided performance and frequently do not know when they are wrong. Worse, they still have near-random accuracy on some socially important subjects such as morality and law. By comprehensively evaluating the breadth and depth of a model's academic and professional understanding, our test can be used to analyze models across many tasks and to identify important shortcomings.
Many interesting tasks in machine learning and computer vision are learned by optimising an objective function defined as a weighted linear combination of multiple losses. The final performance is sensitive to choosing the correct (relative) weights for these losses. Finding a good set of weights is often done by adopting them into the set of hyper-parameters, which are set using an extensive grid search. This is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a weighting scheme based on the coefficient of variations and set the weights based on properties observed while training the model. The proposed method incorporates a measure of uncertainty to balance the losses, and as a result the loss weights evolve during training without requiring another (learning based) optimisation. In contrast to many loss weighting methods in literature, we focus on single-task multi-loss problems, such as monocular depth estimation and semantic segmentation, and show that multi-task approaches for loss weighting do not work on those single-tasks. The validity of the approach is shown empirically for depth estimation and semantic segmentation on multiple datasets.
Transfer learning (TL) utilizes data or knowledge from one or more source domains to facilitate the learning in a target domain. It is particularly useful when the target domain has very few or no labeled data, due to annotation expense, privacy concerns, etc. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of TL is not always guaranteed. Negative transfer (NT), i.e., leveraging source domain data/knowledge undesirably reduces the learning performance in the target domain, has been a long-standing and challenging problem in TL. Various approaches have been proposed in the literature to handle it. However, there does not exist a systematic survey on the formulation of NT, the factors leading to NT, and the algorithms that mitigate NT. This paper fills this gap, by first introducing the definition of NT and its factors, then reviewing about fifty representative approaches for overcoming NT, according to four categories: secure transfer, domain similarity estimation, distant transfer, and NT mitigation. NT in related fields, e.g., multi-task learning, lifelong learning, and adversarial attacks, are also discussed.
Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) aims to extract answers to questions given a passage. It has been widely studied recently, especially in open domains. However, few efforts have been made on closed-domain MRC, mainly due to the lack of large-scale training data. In this paper, we introduce a multi-target MRC task for the medical domain, whose goal is to predict answers to medical questions and the corresponding support sentences from medical information sources simultaneously, in order to ensure the high reliability of medical knowledge serving. A high-quality dataset is manually constructed for the purpose, named Multi-task Chinese Medical MRC dataset (CMedMRC), with detailed analysis conducted. We further propose the Chinese medical BERT model for the task (CMedBERT), which fuses medical knowledge into pre-trained language models by the dynamic fusion mechanism of heterogeneous features and the multi-task learning strategy. Experiments show that CMedBERT consistently outperforms strong baselines by fusing context-aware and knowledge-aware token representations.
A major drawback of cross-network recommender solutions is that they can only be applied to users that are overlapped across networks. Thus, the non-overlapped users, which form the majority of users are ignored. As a solution, we propose CnGAN, a novel multi-task learning based, encoder-GAN-recommender architecture. The proposed model synthetically generates source network user preferences for non-overlapped users by learning the mapping from target to source network preference manifolds. The resultant user preferences are used in a Siamese network based neural recommender architecture. Furthermore, we propose a novel user based pairwise loss function for recommendations using implicit interactions to better guide the generation process in the multi-task learning environment.We illustrate our solution by generating user preferences on the Twitter source network for recommendations on the YouTube target network. Extensive experiments show that the generated preferences can be used to improve recommendations for non-overlapped users. The resultant recommendations achieve superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art cross-network recommender solutions in terms of accuracy, novelty and diversity.
We propose a novel task of joint few-shot recognition and novel-view synthesis: given only one or few images of a novel object from arbitrary views with only category annotation, we aim to simultaneously learn an object classifier and generate images of that type of object from new viewpoints. While existing work copes with two or more tasks mainly by multi-task learning of shareable feature representations, we take a different perspective. We focus on the interaction and cooperation between a generative model and a discriminative model, in a way that facilitates knowledge to flow across tasks in complementary directions. To this end, we propose bowtie networks that jointly learn 3D geometric and semantic representations with a feedback loop. Experimental evaluation on challenging fine-grained recognition datasets demonstrates that our synthesized images are realistic from multiple viewpoints and significantly improve recognition performance as ways of data augmentation, especially in the low-data regime. Code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/zpbao/bowtie_networks.
We propose a new approach to Human Activity Evaluation (HAE) in long videos using graph-based multi-task modeling. Previous works in activity evaluation either directly compute a metric using a detected skeleton or use the scene information to regress the activity score. These approaches are insufficient for accurate activity assessment since they only compute an average score over a clip, and do not consider the correlation between the joints and body dynamics. Moreover, they are highly scene-dependent which makes the generalizability of these methods questionable. We propose a novel multi-task framework for HAE that utilizes a Graph Convolutional Network backbone to embed the interconnections between human joints in the features. In this framework, we solve the Human Activity Segmentation (HAS) problem as an auxiliary task to improve activity assessment. The HAS head is powered by an Encoder-Decoder Temporal Convolutional Network to semantically segment long videos into distinct activity classes, whereas, HAE uses a Long-Short-Term-Memory-based architecture. We evaluate our method on the UW-IOM and TUM Kitchen datasets and discuss the success and failure cases in these two datasets.