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 nested feature selection


Inductive biases of multi-task learning and finetuning: multiple regimes of feature reuse

Neural Information Processing Systems

Neural networks are often trained on multiple tasks, either simultaneously (multi-task learning, MTL) or sequentially (pretraining and subsequent finetuning, PT FT). In particular, it is common practice to pretrain neural networks on a large auxiliary task before finetuning on a downstream task with fewer samples. Despite the prevalence of this approach, the inductive biases that arise from learning multiple tasks are poorly characterized. In this work, we address this gap. We describe novel implicit regularization penalties associated with MTL and PT FT in diagonal linear networks and single-hidden-layer ReLU networks.