Joint-Task Regularization for Partially Labeled Multi-Task Learning
Kento Nishi Junsik Kim Wanhua Li Hanspeter Pfister
Multi-task learning has become increasingly popular in the machine learning
field, but its practicality is hindered by the need for large, labeled
datasets. Most multi-task learning methods depend on fully labeled datasets
wherein each input example is accompanied by ground-truth labels for all target
tasks. Unfortunately, curating such datasets can be prohibitively expensive and
impractical, especially for dense prediction tasks which require per-pixel
labels for each image. With this in mind, we propose Joint-Task Regularization
(JTR), an intuitive technique which leverages cross-task relations to
simultaneously regularize all tasks in a single joint-task latent space to
improve learning when data is not fully labeled for all tasks. JTR stands out
from existing approaches in that it regularizes all tasks jointly rather than
separately in pairs -- therefore, it achieves linear complexity relative to the
number of tasks while previous methods scale quadratically. To demonstrate the
validity of our approach, we extensively benchmark our method across a wide
variety of partially labeled scenarios based on NYU-v2, Cityscapes, and
Taskonomy.