arXiv AI

Capacity and Redundancy Trade-offs in Multi-Task Learning

arXiv:2607. 16554v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In multi-task learning (MTL) negative transfer is often considered as an optimization artifact, but it can also be viewed as a consequence of limited shared capacity and weak task redundancy.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Multi-Task Learning with Covariate-Overlap Regularization

The paper introduces COVER, a multi‑task learning framework that regularizes covariate overlap to mitigate the negative effects of sharing information across tasks with differing covariate distributions and response relationships. COVER blends a common component function, a shared neural representation, and low‑dimensional task‑specific coefficients, using taskwise second‑moment matrices to guide coefficient integration. The authors provide theoretical bias‑variance analysis, oracle inequalities, and neural‑network convergence rates, and demonstrate that COVER outperforms existing deep‑learning and statistical integration methods in simulations and a GTEx central‑nervous‑system study.

By Yang Sui, Qi Xu, Yang Bai, Annie Qu
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Joint Interference Detection and Identification via Adversarial Multi-task Learning

The paper introduces a theoretically grounded multi‑task learning framework, AMTIDIN, for joint interference detection, modulation identification, and interference identification. It derives an upper bound linking MTL performance to task similarity measured by Wasserstein distance and adaptive coefficients, and employs adversarial training to reduce distributional gaps across tasks. Experiments show AMTIDIN outperforms single‑task models and other MTL baselines, especially when training data is limited, signals are short, and SNRs are low.

By H. Xu, L. Hu, B. He, S. Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

SFT Conflicts, RL Coexists: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Multi-Task Learning for LLMs

arXiv:2608. 03573v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) exhibit fundamentally different behaviors in enhancing multi-task reasoning for large language models (LLMs).

By Kejian Zhu, Zhuoran Jin, Shangqing Tu, Hongbang Yuan, Yushi Bai, Kang Liu, Juanzi Li, Jun Zhao
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Graph Coloring for Multi-Task Learning

arXiv:2509. 16959v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When different objectives conflict with each other in multi-task learning, gradients begin to interfere and slow convergence, thereby potentially reducing the final model's performance.

By Santosh Patapati, Ian Noronha
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Model Merging via Data-Free Covariance Estimation

The paper introduces a data‑free method for model merging that estimates per‑layer covariance matrices directly from difference matrices, eliminating the need for auxiliary data. This approach reduces computational costs while maintaining a principled interference‑minimization framework. Experiments on vision and language benchmarks with models from 86 M to 7 B parameters show that the method outperforms existing data‑free merging techniques.

By Marawan Gamal Abdel Hameed, Derek Tam, Pascal Jr Tikeng Notsawo, Colin Raffel, Guillaume Rabusseau