Module-Aware Optimization for Auxiliary Learning

Auxiliary learning is a widely adopted practice in deep learning, which aims to improve the model performance on the primary task by exploiting the beneficial information in the auxiliary loss. Existing auxiliary learning methods only focus on balancing the auxiliary loss and the primary loss, ignoring the module-level auxiliary influence, i.e., an auxiliary loss will be beneficial for optimizing specific modules within the model but harmful to others, failing to make full use of auxiliary information. To tackle the problem, we propose a Module-Aware Optimization approach for Auxiliary Learning (MAOAL). The proposed approach considers the module-level influence through the learnable module-level auxiliary importance, i.e., the importance of each auxiliary loss to each module. Specifically, the proposed approach jointly optimizes the module-level auxiliary importance and the model parameters in a bi-level manner.