Multimedia applications often require concurrent solutions to multiple tasks.
These tasks hold clues to each-others solutions, however as these relations can
be complex this remains a rarely utilized property. When task relations are
explicitly defined based on domain knowledge multi-task learning (MTL) offers
such concurrent solutions, while exploiting relatedness between multiple tasks
performed over the same dataset. In most cases however, this relatedness is not
explicitly defined and the domain expert knowledge that defines it is not
available. To address this issue, we introduce Selective Sharing, a method that
learns the inter-task relatedness from secondary latent features while the
model trains. Using this insight, we can automatically group tasks and allow
them to share knowledge in a mutually beneficial way. We support our method
with experiments on 5 datasets in classification, regression, and ranking tasks
and compare to strong baselines and state-of-the-art approaches showing a
consistent improvement in terms of accuracy and parameter counts. In addition,
we perform an activation region analysis showing how Selective Sharing affects
the learned representation.

本文介绍了一种名为 Selective Sharing 的方法，通过在模型训练过程中学习辅助潜在特征，从而自动将任务分组并允许它们相互共享知识，旨在解决多媒体应用常常需要同时处理多个任务，但这些任务关系复杂，领域专家知识不足的问题。在分类、回归和排名任务的 5 个数据集上进行实验，与强基线和最先进的方法进行比较表明，在准确性和参数计数方面始终有所改善。此外，作者还进行了激活区域分析，展示了 Selective Sharing 如何影响所学的表示。