Inductive transfer with context-sensitive neural networks

Context-sensitive Multiple Task Learning, or csMTL, is presented as a method of inductive transfer which uses a single output neural network and additional contextual inputs for learning multiple tasks. Motivated by problems with the application of MTL networks to machine lifelong learning systems, csMTL encoding of multiple task examples was developed and found to improve predictive performance. As evidence, the csMTL method is tested on seven task domains and shown to produce hypotheses for primary tasks that are often better than standard MTL hypotheses when learning in the presence of related and unrelated tasks. We argue that the reason for this performance improvement is a reduction in the number of effective free parameters in the csMTL network brought about by the shared output node and weight update constraints due to the context inputs. An examination of IDT and SVM models developed from csMTL encoded data provides initial evidence that this improvement is not shared across all machine learning models.     

A notion of task relatedness yielding provable multiple-task learning guarantees

The approach of learning multiple “related” tasks simultaneously has proven quite successful in practice; however, theoretical justification for this success has remained elusive. The starting point for previous work on multiple task learning has been that the tasks to be learned jointly are somehow “algorithmically related”, in the sense that the results of applying a specific learning algorithm to these tasks are assumed to be similar. We offer an alternative approach, defining relatedness of tasks on the basis of similarity between the example generating distributions that underlie these tasks. We provide a formal framework for this notion of task relatedness, which captures a sub-domain of the wide scope of issues in which one may apply a multiple task learning approach. Our notion of task similarity is relevant to a variety of real life multitask learning scenarios and allows the formal derivation of generalization bounds that are strictly stronger than the previously known bounds for both the learning-to-learn and the multitask learning scenarios. We give precise conditions under which our bounds guarantee generalization on the basis of smaller sample sizes than the standard single-task approach. Editors: Daniel Silver, Kristin Bennett, Richard Caruana. A preliminary version of this paper appears in the proceedings of COLT’03, (Ben-David and Schuller 2003).     

基于边际Fisher准则和迁移学习的小样本集分类器设计算法

如何利用大量已有的同构标记数据（源域）设计小样本训练数据（目标域）的分类器是一个具有很强应用意义的研究问题. 由于不同域的数据特征分布有差异,直接使用源域数据对目标域样本进行分类的效果并不理想. 针对上述问题,本文提出了一种基于迁移学习的分类器设计算法. 首先,本文利用内积度量的边际Fisher准则对源域进行特征映射,提高源域中类内紧凑性和类间区分性. 其次,为了筛选合理的训练样本对,本文提出一种去除边界奇异点的算法来选择源域密集区域样本点,与目标域中的标记样本点组成训练样本对. 在核化空间上,本文学习了目标域特征到源域特征的非线性转换,将目标域映射到源域. 最后,利用邻近算法（k-nearest neighbor,kNN）分类器对映射后的目标域样本进行分类. 本文不仅改进了边际Fisher准则方法,并且将基于自适应样本对 筛选的迁移学习应用到小样本数据的分类器设计中,提高域间适应性. 在通用数据集上的实验结果表明,本文提出的方法能够有效提高小样本训练域的分类器性能.     

基于迁移学习的多任务分配算法

对于多任务分配问题，传统的方法针对每一个任务独立地寻找一个最优分配方案，没有考虑任务间的关联以及历史经验对新任务分配的影响，因而复杂度较高。研究了多智能体系统中的多任务分配问题，通过迁移学习来加速任务分配以及子任务的完成。在分配目标任务时，通过计算当前任务和历史任务的相似度找到最适合的源任务，再将源任务的分配模式迁移到目标任务中，并在完成子任务的过程中使用迁移学习，从而提高效率，节约时间。最后，通过“格子世界”的实验证明了该算法在运行时间和平均带折扣回报方面都优于基于Q学习的任务分配算法。     

Learning multi-tasks with inconsistent labels by using auxiliary big task

Multi-task learning is to improve the performance of the model by transferring and exploiting common knowledge among tasks. Existing MTL works mainly focus on the scenario where label sets among multiple tasks (MTs) are usually the same, thus they can be utilized for learning across the tasks. However, the real world has more general scenarios in which each task has only a small number of training samples and their label sets are just partially overlapped or even not. Learning such MTs is more challenging because of less correlation information available among these tasks. For this, we propose a framework to learn these tasks by jointly leveraging both abundant information from a learnt auxiliary big task with sufficiently many classes to cover those of all these tasks and the information shared among those partially-overlapped tasks. In our implementation of using the same neural network architecture of the learnt auxiliary task to learn individual tasks, the key idea is to utilize available label information to adaptively prune the hidden layer neurons of the auxiliary network to construct corresponding network for each task, while accompanying a joint learning across individual tasks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is significantly competitive compared to state-of-the-art methods.     

一种面向多源领域的实例迁移学习

在迁移学习最大的特点就是利用相关领域的知识来帮助完成目标领域中的学习任务,它能够有效地在相似的领域或任务之间进行信息的共享和迁移,使传统的从零开始的学习变成可积累的学习,具有成本低、效率高等优点.针对源领域数据和目标领域数据分布类似的情况,提出一种基于多源动态TrAdaBoost的实例迁移学习方法.该方法考虑多个源领域知识,使得目标任务的学习可以充分利用所有源领域信息,每次训练候选分类器时,所有源领域样本都参与学习,可以获得有利于目标任务学习的有用信息,从而避免负迁移的产生.理论分析验证了所提算法较单源迁移的优势,以及加入动态因子改善了源权重收敛导致的权重熵由源样本转移到目标样本的问题.实验结果验证了此算法在提高识别率方面的优势.     

联合多任务学习的人脸超分辨率重建

目的 人脸超分辨率重建是特定应用领域的超分辨率问题,为了充分利用面部先验知识,提出一种基于多任务联合学习的深度人脸超分辨率重建算法。方法 首先使用残差学习和对称式跨层连接网络提取低分辨率人脸的多层次特征,根据不同任务的学习难易程度设置损失权重和损失阈值,对网络进行多属性联合学习训练。然后使用感知损失函数衡量HR（high-resolution）图像与SR（super-resolution）图像在语义层面的差距,并论证感知损失在提高人脸语义信息重建效果方面的有效性。最后对人脸属性数据集进行增强,在此基础上进行联合多任务学习,以获得视觉感知效果更加真实的超分辨率结果。结果 使用峰值信噪比（PSNR）和结构相似度（SSIM）两个客观评价标准对实验结果进行评价,并与其他主流方法进行对比。实验结果显示,在人脸属性数据集（CelebA）上,在放大8倍时,与通用超分辨率MemNet（persistent memory network）算法和人脸超分辨率FSRNet（end-to-end learning face super-resolution network）算法相比,本文算法的PSNR分别提升约2.15 dB和1.2 dB。结论 实验数据与效果图表明本文算法可以更好地利用人脸先验知识,产生在视觉感知上更加真实和清晰的人脸边缘和纹理细节。     

基于多任务强化学习的堆垛机调度与库位推荐

堆垛机调度是物流仓储自动化中的重要任务,任务中的出入库效率、货物存放等情况影响仓储系统的整体效益。传统调度方法在面对较大规模调度问题时,因处理大状态空间从而导致性能受限和收益降低。与此同时,库位优化与调度运行联系密切,但现有多数工作在处理调度问题时未能考虑到库位优化问题。为解决仓储中堆垛机调度问题,提出一种基于深度强化学习算法的近端策略优化调度方法。将调度问题视为序列决策问题,通过智能体与环境的持续交互进行自我学习,以在不断变化的环境中优化调度。针对调度中伴生的库位优化问题,提出一种基于多任务学习的调度、库位推荐联合算法,并基于调度网络构建适用于库位推荐的Actor网络,通过与Critic网络进行交互反馈,促进整体的联动和训练,从而提升整体效益。实验结果表明,与原算法模型相比,该调度方法的累计回报值指标平均提升了33.6%,所提的多任务学习的联合算法能有效地应对堆垛机调度和库位优化的应用场景,可为该类多任务问题提供可行的解决方案。     

一种结合限制的多任务学习策略及其应用

定义任务之间的偏序限制,基于偏序限制可以联系原先独立的任务.分析偏序限制的应用,给出一个协同演化的多任务学习框架,它反复地通过各个任务的独立演化以寻优,通过联合调整以结合偏序限制.给出本框架在构建猪肉预冷损耗曲线过程中的应用:考虑了低湿损耗曲线与中湿损耗曲线间的偏序关系,利用协同演化,在样本量很少时,也能获得合理的低湿和中湿损耗曲线.对于4个标准测试函数的测试显示了本策略对于一般问题的有效性.