We study adaptive pooling under predictive heterogeneity in high-dimensional multivariate time series forecasting, where global models improve statistical efficiency but may fail to capture heterogeneous predictive structure, while naive specialization can induce negative transfer. We formulate adaptive pooling as a statistical decision problem and propose a validation-driven framework that determines when and how specialization should be applied. Rather than grouping series based on representation similarity, we define partitions through out-of-sample predictive performance, thereby aligning data organization with predictive risk, defined as expected out-of-sample loss and approximated via validation error. Cluster assignments are iteratively updated using validation losses for both point (Huber) and probabilistic (pinball) forecasting, improving robustness to heavy-tailed errors and local anomalies. To ensure reliability, we introduce a leakage-free fallback mechanism that reverts to a global model whenever specialization fails to improve validation performance, providing a safeguard against performance degradation under a strict training-validation-test protocol. Experiments on large-scale traffic datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines while avoiding degradation when heterogeneity is weak. Overall, the proposed framework provides a principled and practically reliable approach to adaptive pooling in high-dimensional forecasting problems.

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) offers a promising solution to the data sparsity problem by enabling knowledge transfer between source and target domains. However, many recent CDR models overlook crucial issues such as privacy as well as the risk of negative transfer (which negatively impact model performance), especially in multi-domain settings.

We conducted the experiment on Meta-World, a multi-task RL benchmark containing various robotics manipulation tasks.

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

Even in large language models, negative transfer problems may still exist.

Even in large language models, negative transfer problems may still exist.

Tocircumvent thisissue,wepropose anovelmulti-task learning method, whichsimultaneously learns latent task representations and a block-diagonal Latent Task Assignment Matrix (LTAM).