Disentangled Latent Spaces Facilitate Data-Driven Auxiliary Learning
Geri Skenderi Luigi Capogrosso Andrea Toaiari Matteo Denitto Franco Fummi Simone Melzi Marco Cristani
In deep learning, auxiliary objectives are often used to facilitate learning
in situations where data is scarce, or the principal task is extremely complex.
This idea is primarily inspired by the improved generalization capability
induced by solving multiple tasks simultaneously, which leads to a more robust
shared representation. Nevertheless, finding optimal auxiliary tasks that give
rise to the desired improvement is a crucial problem that often requires
hand-crafted solutions or expensive meta-learning approaches. In this paper, we
propose a novel framework, dubbed Detaux, whereby a weakly supervised
disentanglement procedure is used to discover new unrelated classification
tasks and the associated labels that can be exploited with the principal task
in any Multi-Task Learning (MTL) model. The disentanglement procedure works at
a representation level, isolating a subspace related to the principal task,
plus an arbitrary number of orthogonal subspaces. In the most disentangled
subspaces, through a clustering procedure, we generate the additional
classification tasks, and the associated labels become their representatives.
Subsequently, the original data, the labels associated with the principal task,
and the newly discovered ones can be fed into any MTL framework. Extensive
validation on both synthetic and real data, along with various ablation
studies, demonstrate promising results, revealing the potential in what has
been, so far, an unexplored connection between learning disentangled
representations and MTL. The code will be made publicly available upon
acceptance.