Learning-to-learn or meta-learning leverages data-driven inductive bias to increase the efficiency of learning on a novel task.

We thank all the reviewers for the time and expertise invested in these reviews. Q: What is the meaning of every notation? Their corresponding lowercase letter refer to one instance in the set, e.g. Q: What is the relationship to other Transfer Learning/Imitation Learning method? Since there are no major flaws pointed out in the review, could the reviewer please raise the overall score?

This enables learning on new tasks using far less data than is required to learn them in isolation.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Event logs reflect the behavior of business processes that are mapped in organizational information systems. Predictive process monitoring (PPM) transforms these data into value by creating process-related predictions that provide the insights required for proactive interventions at process runtime. Existing PPM techniques require sufficient amounts of event data or other relevant resources that might not be readily available, which prevents some organizations from utilizing PPM. The transfer learning-based PPM technique presented in this paper allows organizations without suitable event data or other relevant resources to implement PPM for effective decision support. This technique is instantiated in both a real-life intra- and an inter-organizational use case, based on which numerical experiments are performed using event logs for IT service management processes. The results of the experiments suggest that knowledge of one business process can be transferred to a similar business process in the same or a different organization to enable effective PPM in the target context. The proposed technique allows organizations to benefit from transfer learning in intra- and inter-organizational settings by transferring resources such as pre-trained models within and across organizational boundaries.

Transfer learning algorithms are used when one has sufficient training data for one supervised learning task (the source/training domain) but only very limited training data for a second task (the target/test domain) that is similar but not identical to the first. Previous work on transfer learning has focused on relatively restricted settings, where specific parts of the model are considered to be carried over between tasks. Recent work on covariate shift focuses on matching the marginal distributions on observations $X$ across domains. Similarly, work on target/conditional shift focuses on matching marginal distributions on labels $Y$ and adjusting conditional distributions $P(X|Y)$, such that $P(X)$ can be matched across domains. However, covariate shift assumes that the support of test $P(X)$ is contained in the support of training $P(X)$, i.e., the training set is richer than the test set. Target/conditional shift makes a similar assumption for $P(Y)$.

Multitask learning (MTL) algorithms typically rely on schemes that combine different task losses or their gradients through weighted averaging. These methods aim to find Pareto stationary points by using heuristics that require access to task loss values, gradients, or both. In doing so, a central challenge arises because task losses can be arbitrarily, nonaffinely scaled relative to one another, causing certain tasks to dominate training and degrade overall performance. A recent advance in cooperative bargaining theory, the Direction-based Bargaining Solution (DiBS), yields Pareto stationary solutions immune to task domination because of its invariance to monotonic nonaffine task loss transformations. However, the convergence behavior of DiBS in nonconvex MTL settings is currently not understood. To this end, we prove that under standard assumptions, a subsequence of DiBS iterates converges to a Pareto stationary point when task losses are possibly nonconvex, and propose DiBS-MTL, a computationally efficient adaptation of DiBS to the MTL setting. Finally, we validate DiBS-MTL empirically on standard MTL benchmarks, showing that it achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods while maintaining robustness to nonaffine monotonic transformations that significantly degrade the performance of existing approaches, including prior bargaining-inspired MTL methods. Code available at https://github.com/suryakmurthy/dibs-mtl.