Sharing information between multiple tasks enables algorithms to achieve good generalization performance even from small amounts of training data. However, in a realistic scenario of multi-task learning not all tasks are equally related to each other, hence it could be advantageous to transfer information only between the most related tasks. In this work we propose an approach that processes multiple tasks in a sequence with sharing between subsequent tasks instead of solving all tasks jointly. Subsequently, we address the question of curriculum learning of tasks, i.e. finding the best order of tasks to be learned. Our approach is based on a generalization bound criterion for choosing the task order that optimizes the average expected classification performance over all tasks. Our experimental results show that learning multiple related tasks sequentially can be more effective than learning them jointly, the order in which tasks are being solved affects the overall performance, and that our model is able to automatically discover the favourable order of tasks.
Methods based on the sharing of weight vector have also been generalized since their original introduction in @cite_1 , in particular to relax the assumption that all tasks have to be related. @cite_21 , Evgeniou achieved this by introducing a graph regularization. Alternatively, Chen @cite_28 proposed to penalize deviations in weight vectors for highly correlated tasks. However, these methods require prior knowledge about the amount of similarities between tasks. In contrast, the algorithm we present in this work does not assume all tasks to be related, yet does not need a priori information regarding their similarities, either.
@cite_28 @cite_21 @cite_1
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In multi-task learning several related tasks are considered simultaneously, with the hope that by an appropriate sharing of information across tasks, each task may benefit from the others. In the context of learning linear functions for supervised classification or regression, this can be achieved by including a priori information about the weight vectors associated with the tasks, and how they are expected to be related to each other. In this paper, we assume that tasks are clustered into groups, which are unknown beforehand, and that tasks within a group have similar weight vectors. We design a new spectral norm that encodes this a priori assumption, without the prior knowledge of the partition of tasks into groups, resulting in a new convex optimization formulation for multi-task learning. We show in simulations on synthetic examples and on the IEDB MHC-I binding dataset, that our approach outperforms well-known convex methods for multi-task learning, as well as related non convex methods dedicated to the same problem. In most kernel based online learning algorithms, when an incoming instance is misclassified, it will be added into the pool of support vectors and assigned with a weight, which often remains unchanged during the rest of the learning process. This is clearly insufficient since when a new support vector is added, we generally expect the weights of the other existing support vectors to be updated in order to reflect the influence of the added support vector. In this paper, we propose a new online learning method, termed Double Updating Online Learning, or DUOL for short, that explicitly addresses this problem. Instead of only assigning a fixed weight to the misclassified example received at the current trial, the proposed online learning algorithm also tries to update the weight for one of the existing support vectors. We show that the mistake bound can be improved by the proposed online learning method. We conduct an extensive set of empirical evaluations for both binary and multi-class online learning tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed technique is considerably more effective than the state-of-the-art online learning algorithms. The source code is available to public at http: www.cais.ntu.edu.sg chhoi DUOL . In typical classification tasks, we seek a function which assigns a label to a single object. Kernel-based approaches, such as support vector machines (SVMs), which maximize the margin of confidence of the classifier, are the method of choice for many such tasks. Their popularity stems both from the ability to use high-dimensional feature spaces, and from their strong theoretical guarantees. However, many real-world tasks involve sequential, spatial, or structured data, where multiple labels must be assigned. Existing kernel-based methods ignore structure in the problem, assigning labels independently to each object, losing much useful information. Conversely, probabilistic graphical models, such as Markov networks, can represent correlations between labels, by exploiting problem structure, but cannot handle high-dimensional feature spaces, and lack strong theoretical generalization guarantees. In this paper, we present a new framework that combines the advantages of both approaches: Maximum margin Markov (M3) networks incorporate both kernels, which efficiently deal with high-dimensional features, and the ability to capture correlations in structured data. We present an efficient algorithm for learning M3 networks based on a compact quadratic program formulation. We provide a new theoretical bound for generalization in structured domains. Experiments on the task of handwritten character recognition and collective hypertext classification demonstrate very significant gains over previous approaches. We describe methods to predict a crowd worker's accuracy on new tasks based on his accuracy on past tasks. Such prediction provides a foundation for identifying the best workers to route work to in order to maximize accuracy on the new task. Our key insight is to model similarity of past tasks to the target task such that past task accuracies can be optimally integrated to predict target task accuracy. We describe two matrix factorization (MF) approaches from collaborative filtering which not only exploit such task similarity, but are known to be robust to sparse data. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets provide feasibility assessment and comparative evaluation of MF approaches vs. two baseline methods. Across a range of data scales and task similarity conditions, we evaluate: 1) prediction error over all workers; and 2) how well each method predicts the best workers to use for each task. Results show the benefit of task routing over random assignment, the strength of probabilistic MF over baseline methods, and the robustness of methods under different conditions.