Dual-Balancing for Multi-Task Learning

Baijiong Lin, Weisen Jiang, Feiyang YE, Yu Zhang, Pengguang Chen, Ying-Cong Chen, Shu Liu, James Kwok

Primary Area: general machine learning (i.e., none of the above)

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Keywords: multi-task learning

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Abstract: Multi-task learning (MTL), a learning paradigm to learn multiple related tasks simultaneously, has achieved great success in various fields. However, task balancing problem remains a significant challenge in MTL, with the disparity in loss/gradient scales often leading to performance compromises. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Balancing Multi-Task Learning (DB-MTL) method to alleviate the task balancing problem from both loss and gradient perspectives. Specifically, DB-MTL ensures loss-scale balancing by performing a logarithm transformation on each task loss, and guarantees gradient-magnitude balancing via normalizing all task gradients to the same magnitude as the maximum gradient norm. Extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets consistently demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of DB-MTL.

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Submission Number: 3130