Generalized Block-Diagonal Structure Pursuit: Learning Soft Latent Task Assignment against Negative Transfer

In multi-task learning, a major challenge springs from a notorious issue known as negative transfer, which refers to the phenomenon that sharing the knowledge with dissimilar and hard tasks often results in a worsened performance. To circumvent this issue, we propose a novel multi-task learning method, which simultaneously learns latent task representations and a block-diagonal Latent Task Assignment Matrix (LTAM). Different from most of the previous work, pursuing the Block-Diagonal structure of LTAM (assigning latent tasks to output tasks) alleviates negative transfer via collaboratively grouping latent tasks and output tasks such that inter-group knowledge transfer and sharing is suppressed. This goal is challenging, since 1) our notion of Block-Diagonal Property extends the traditional notion for square matrices where the i -th column and the i -th column represents the same concept; 2) marginal constraints on rows and columns are also required for avoiding isolated latent/output tasks. Facing such challenges, we propose a novel regularizer by means of an equivalent spectral condition realizing this generalized block-diagonal property.