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Title: Which Tasks Should Be Learned Together in Multi-task Learning?

Paper content:
Many computer vision applications require solving multiple tasks in real-time.
A neural network can be trained to solve multiple tasks simultaneously using 'multi-task learning'.
This saves computation at inference time as only a single network needs to be evaluated.
Unfortunately, this often leads to inferior overall performance as task objectives compete, which consequently poses the question: which tasks should and should not be learned together in one network when employing multi-task learning?
We systematically study task cooperation and competition and propose a framework for assigning tasks to a few neural networks such that cooperating tasks are computed by the same neural network, while competing tasks are computed by different networks.
Our framework offers a time-accuracy trade-off and can produce better accuracy using less inference time than not only a single large multi-task neural network but also many single-task networks.
Many applications, especially robotics and autonomous vehicles, are chiefly interested in using multi-task learning to reduce the inference time and computational complexity required to estimate many characteristics of visual input.
For example, an autonomous vehicle may need to detect the location of pedestrians, determine a per-pixel depth, and predict objects' trajectories, all within tens of milliseconds.
In multi-task learning, multiple tasks are solved at the same time, typically with a single neural network.
In addition to reduced inference time, solving a set of tasks jointly rather than independently can, in theory, have other benefits such as improved prediction accuracy, increased data efficiency, and reduced training time.
Unfortunately, the quality of predictions are often observed to suffer when a network is tasked with making multiple predictions.
This is because learning objectives can have complex and unknown dynamics and may compete.
In fact, multi-task performance can suffer so much that smaller independent networks are often superior (as we will see in the experiments section).
We refer to any situation in which the competing priorities of the network cause poor task performance as crosstalk.
On the other hand, when task objectives do not interfere much with each other, performance on both tasks can be maintained or even improved when jointly trained.
Intuitively, this loss or gain of quality seems to depend on the relationship between the jointly trained tasks.
Prior work has studied the relationship between tasks for transfer learning (Zamir et al. (2018) ).
However, we find that transfer relationships are not highly predictive of multi-task relationships.
In addition to studying multi-task relationships, we attempt to determine how to produce good prediction accuracy under a limited inference time budget by assigning competing tasks to separate networks and cooperating tasks to the same network.
More concretely, this leads to the following problem: Given a set of tasks, T , and a computational budget b (e.g., maximum allowable inference time), what is the optimal way to assign tasks to networks with combined cost ≤ b such that a combined measure of task performances is maximized?
To this end, we develop a computational framework for choosing the best tasks to group together in order to have a small number of separate deep neural networks that completely cover the task set and that maximize task performance under a given computational budget.
We make the intriguing Figure 1 : Given five tasks to solve, there are many ways that they can be split into task groups for multitask learning.
How do we find the best one?
We propose a computational framework that, for instance, suggests the following grouping to achieve the lowest total loss, using a computational budget of 2.5 units: train network A to solve Semantic Segmentation, Depth Estimation, and Surface Normal Prediction; train network B to solve Keypoint Detection, Edge Detection, and Surface Normal Prediction; train network C with a less computationally expensive encoder to solve Surface Normal Prediction alone; including Surface Normals as an output in the first two networks were found advantageous for improving the other outputs, while the best Normals were predicted by the third network.
This task grouping outperforms all other feasible ones, including learning all five tasks in one large network or using five dedicated smaller networks.
observation that the inclusion of an additional task in a network can potentially improve the accuracy of the other tasks, even though the performance of the added task might be poor.
This can be viewed as regularizing or guiding the loss of one task by adding an additional loss, as often employed in curriculum learning or network regularization Bengio et al. (2009) .
Achieving this, of course, depends on picking the proper regularizing task -our system can take advantage of this phenomenon, as schematically shown in Figure 1 .
This paper has two main contributions.
In Section 3, we outline a framework for systematically assigning tasks to networks in order to achieve the best total prediction accuracy with a limited inference-time budget.
We then analyze the resulting accuracy and show that selecting the best assignment of tasks to groups is critical for good performance.
Secondly, in Section 6, we analyze situations in which multi-task learning helps and when it doesn't, quantify the compatibilities of various task combinations for multi-task learning, compare them to the transfer learning task affinities, and discuss the implications.
Moreover, we analyze the factors that influence multi-task affinities.
We describe the problem of task compatibility as it pertains to multi-task learning.
We provide an algorithm and computational framework for determining which tasks should be trained jointly and which tasks should be trained separately.
Our solution can take advantage of situations in which joint training is beneficial to some tasks but not others in the same group.
For many use cases, this framework is sufficient, but it can be costly at training time.
Hence, we offer two strategies for coping with this issue and evaluate their performance.
Our methods outperform single-task networks, a multi-task network with all tasks trained jointly, as well as other baselines.
Finally, we use this opportunity to analyze how particular tasks interact in a multi-task setting and compare that with previous results on transfer learning task interactions.

assistant: text: We analyze what tasks are best learned together in one network, and which are best to learn separately.