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Title: Task-Based Top-Down Modulation Network for Multi-Task-Learning Applications

Paper content:
A general problem that received considerable recent attention is how to perform multiple tasks in the same network, maximizing both efficiency and prediction accuracy.
A popular approach consists of a multi-branch architecture on top of a
shared backbone, jointly trained on a weighted sum of losses.
However, in many cases, the shared representation results in non-optimal performance, mainly due to an interference between conflicting gradients of uncorrelated tasks.
Recent approaches address this problem by a channel-wise modulation of the feature-maps along the shared backbone, with task specific vectors, manually or dynamically tuned.
Taking this approach a step further, we propose a novel architecture which
modulate the recognition network channel-wise, as well as spatial-wise, with an efficient top-down image-dependent computation scheme.
Our architecture uses no task-specific branches, nor task specific modules.
Instead, it uses a top-down modulation network that is shared between all of the tasks.
We show the effectiveness of our scheme by achieving on par or better results than alternative approaches on both correlated and uncorrelated sets of tasks.
We also demonstrate our advantages in terms of model size, the addition of novel tasks and interpretability.
Code will be released.
The goal of multi-task learning is to improve the learning efficiency and increase the prediction accuracy of multiple tasks learned and performed together in a shared network.
Over the years, several types of architectures have been proposed to combine multiple tasks training and evaluation.
Most current schemes assume task-specific branches, on top of a shared backbone (Figure 1a) and use a weighted sum of tasks losses, fixed or dynamically tuned, to train them (Chen et al., 2017; Kendall et al., 2018; Sener & Koltun, 2018) .
Having a shared representation is more efficient from the standpoint of memory and sample complexity and can also be beneficial in cases where the tasks are correlated to each other (Maninis et al., 2019) .
However, in many other cases, the shared representation can also result in worse performance due to the limited capacity of the shared backbone and interference between conflicting gradients of uncorrelated tasks (Zhao et al., 2018) .
The performance of the multi-branch architecture is highly dependent on the relative losses weights and the task correlations, and cannot be easily determined without a "trial and error" phase search (Kendall et al., 2018) .
Another type of architecture (Maninis et al., 2019 ) that has been recently proposed uses task specific modules, integrated along a feed-forward backbone and producing task-specific vectors to modulate the feature-maps along it (Figure 1b) .
Here, both training and evaluation use a single tasking paradigm: executing one task at a time, rather than getting all the task responses in a single forward pass of the network.
A possible disadvantage of using task-specific modules and of using a fixed number of branches, is that it may become difficult to add additional tasks at a later time during the system life-time.
Modulation-based architectures have been also proposed by Strezoski et al. (2019) and Zhao et al. (2018) (Figure 1c ).
However, all of these works modulate the recognition network channel-wise, using the same modulation vector for all the spatial dimension of the feature-maps.
We propose a new type of architecture with no branching, which performs single task at a time but with no task-specific modules (Figure 1d ).
The core component of our approach is a top-down (TD)
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d) Figure 1:
(a) Multi branched architecture, task specific branches on a top of a shared backbone, induces capacity and destructive interference problems, force careful tuning.
Recently proposed architectures:
(b) using tasks specific modules and
(c) using channel-wise modulation modules.
(d) Our architecture: a top-down image-aware full tensor modulation network with no task specific modules.
modulation network, which carries the task information in combination with the image information, obtained from a first bottom-up (BU1) network, and modulates a second bottom-up (BU2) network common for all the tasks.
In our approach, the modulation is channel-wise as well as spatial-wise (a full tensor modulation), calculated sequentially along the TD stream.
This allows us, for example, to modulate only specific spatial locations of the image depending on the current task, and get interpretability properties by visualizing the activations in the lowest feature-map of the TD stream.
In contrast to previous works, our modulation mechanism is also "image-aware" in the sense that information from the image, extracted by the BU1 stream, is accumulated by the TD stream, and affects the modulation process.
The main differences between our approach and previous approaches are the following: First, as mentioned, our approach does not use multiple branches or task-specific modules.
We can scale the number of tasks with no additional layers.
Second, our modulation scheme includes a spatial component, which allows attention to specific locations in the image, as illustrated in figure 2a for the Multi-MNIST tasks (Sabour et al., 2017) .
Third, the modulation in our scheme is also image dependent and can modulate regions of the image based on their content rather than location (relevant examples are demonstrated in figures 2b and 2c).
We empirically evaluated the proposed approach on three different datasets.
First, we demonstrated on par accuracies with the single task baseline on an uncorrelated set of tasks with MultiMNIST while using less parameters.
Second, we examined the case of correlated tasks and outperformed all baselines on the CLEVR (Johnson et al., 2017) dataset.
Third, we scaled the number of tasks and demonstrated our inherent attention mechanism on the CUB200 (Welinder et al., 2010) dataset.
The choice of datasets includes cases where the tasks are uncorrelated (Multi-MNIST) and cases where the tasks are relatively correlated (CLEVR and CUB200).
The results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can successfully handle both cases and shows distinct advantages over the channel-wise modulation approach.

assistant: text: We propose a top-down modulation network for multi-task learning applications with several advantages over current schemes.