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Bridging Multi-Task Learning and Meta-Learning: Towards Efficient Training and Effective Adaptation
Haoxiang Wang · Han Zhao · Bo Li

Thu Jul 22 06:40 PM -- 06:45 PM (PDT) @
in Multi-task Learning 2 »

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to improve the generalization of several related tasks by learning them jointly. As a comparison, in addition to the joint training scheme, modern meta-learning allows unseen tasks with limited labels during the test phase, in the hope of fast adaptation over them. Despite the subtle difference between MTL and meta-learning in the problem formulation, both learning paradigms share the same insight that the shared structure between existing training tasks could lead to better generalization and adaptation. In this paper, we take one important step further to understand the close connection between these two learning paradigms, through both theoretical analysis and empirical investigation. Theoretically, we first demonstrate that MTL shares the same optimization formulation with a class of gradient-based meta-learning (GBML) algorithms. We then prove that for over-parameterized neural networks with sufficient depth, the learned predictive functions of MTL and GBML are close. In particular, this result implies that the predictions given by these two models are similar over the same unseen task. Empirically, we corroborate our theoretical findings by showing that, with proper implementation, MTL is competitive against state-of-the-art GBML algorithms on a set of few-shot image classification benchmarks. Since existing GBML algorithms often involve costly second-order bi-level optimization, our first-order MTL method is an order of magnitude faster on large-scale datasets such as mini-ImageNet. We believe this work could help bridge the gap between these two learning paradigms, and provide a computationally efficient alternative to GBML that also supports fast task adaptation.

Keywords: Algorithms · Multitask, Transfer, and Meta Learning

Author Information

Haoxiang Wang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

A Ph.D. student from UIUC, working on machine learning with theoretical guarantees.

Han Zhao (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Bo Li (UIUC)
Bo Li

Dr. Bo Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is the recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, AI’s 10 to Watch, NSF CAREER Award, MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, C.W. Gear Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Intel Rising Star award, Symantec Research Labs Fellowship, Rising Star Award, Research Awards from Tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Intel, IBM, and eBay, and best paper awards at several top machine learning and security conferences. Her research focuses on both theoretical and practical aspects of trustworthy machine learning, which is at the intersection of machine learning, security, privacy, and game theory. She has designed several scalable frameworks for trustworthy machine learning and privacy-preserving data publishing. Her work has been featured by major publications and media outlets such as Nature, Wired, Fortune, and New York Times.

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