ICML Discuss
Flexible Modeling of Latent Task Structures in Multitask Learning
by Alexandre Passos, Piyush Rai, Jacques Wainer, Hal Daume III at ICML 2012
When learning multiple related tasks with limited training data per task, it is natural to share parameters across tasks to improve generalization performance. Imposing the correct notion of task relatedness is critical to achieve this goal. However, one rarely knows the correct relatedness notion a priori. We present a generative model that is based on the weight vector of each task being drawn from a nonparametric mixture of nonparametric factor analyzers. The nonparametric aspect of the model makes it broad enough to subsume many types of latent task structures previously considered in the literature as special cases, and also allows it to learn more general task structures, addressing their individual shortcomings. This brings in considerable flexibility as compared to the commonly used multitask learning models that are based on some a priori fixed notion of task relatedness. We also present an efficient variational inference algorithm for our model. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets, on both regression and classification problems, establish the efficacy of the proposed method.

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