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
Transformers can learn broad families of tasks during pretraining and adapt to unseen tasks from a short prompt, but a rigorous understanding of this capability is limited. This paper studies how shared cross‑task structure influences the sample complexity of in‑context learning (ICL) by characterizing task‑space complexity through covering numbers, yielding a set of anchor functions that localize unseen tasks and predict responses. The authors construct a Transformer with Softmax attention to approximate this procedure and derive an error bound that separates the effects of pretraining tasks and prompt length, showing that once enough tasks are available the dependence on prompt length becomes dimension‑free.
By Zhongjie Shi, Rongjie Lai, Alexander Cloninger, Wenjing Liao
arXiv:2607. 02681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Integrating information across related tasks can improve estimation and prediction in transfer, multi-task, and federated learning, but contamination and heterogeneity make robust borrowing challenging.
By Ye Tian, Mengchu Li, Marco Avella Medina
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.
By Asif Khan
arXiv:2606. 02221v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to construct a joint model for multiple tasks by sharing a common representation across domains.
By Chengfeng Wu, Tao Zou, Yanru Wu, Jingge Wang
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:2607. 00995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most existing multitask learning approaches are limited by their reliance on task-specific loss functions tailored to the scale and type of each outcome.
By Huichao Li, Tong Wang, Sanguo Zhang, Shuangge Ma
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:2606. 26902v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-task model merging aims to consolidate several task-specific experts into a unified model, yet static merging consistently suffers from parameter interference.
By Jinwook Jung, Taegyu Kim, Kumju Jo, Sungyong Baik
arXiv:2606. 07500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning in Large Language Models (LLMs) is hindered by the plasticity-stability dilemma, where acquiring new capabilities often leads to catastrophic forgetting of previous knowledge.
By Fatema Siddika, Md Anwar Hossen, Tanwi Mallick, Ali Jannesari
arXiv:2606. 19164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model.
By Longhua Li, Lei Qi, Xin Geng, Qi Tian
arXiv:2606. 18627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a training-free alternative to multi-task learning, aiming to combine multiple task-specific fine-tuned models into a single multi-task model.
By Ningyuan Shi, Zhipeng Zhou, Hao Wang, Chunyan Miao, Peilin Zhao