English
Related papers

Related papers: A No-Free-Lunch Theorem for MultiTask Learning

200 papers

A proper understanding of the striking generalization abilities of deep neural networks presents an enduring puzzle. Recently, there has been a growing body of numerically-grounded theoretical work that has contributed important insights to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-31 Tyler Lee , Anthony Ndirango

Classical consensus-based strategies for federated and decentralized learning are statistically suboptimal in the presence of heterogeneous local data or task distributions. As a result, in recent years, there has been growing interest in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zirui Wan , Stefan Vlaski

We propose ADAPT, a meta-learning algorithm that \emph{learns} task sampling proportions under an explicit token budget for multi-task instruction tuning. Instead of fixing task weights by hand, \adapt{} maintains a continuous distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Pritam Kadasi , Abhishek Upperwal , Mayank SIngh

We study the problem of multi-task non-smooth optimization that arises ubiquitously in statistical learning, decision-making and risk management. We develop a data fusion approach that adaptively leverages commonalities among a large number…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-25 Henry Lam , Kaizheng Wang , Yuhang Wu , Yichen Zhang

In transfer learning, we wish to make inference about a target population when we have access to data both from the distribution itself, and from a different but related source distribution. We introduce a flexible framework for transfer…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-03 Henry W. J. Reeve , Timothy I. Cannings , Richard J. Samworth

The no-free-lunch theorems promote a skeptical conclusion that all possible machine learning algorithms equally lack justification. But how could this leave room for a learning theory, that shows that some algorithms are better than others?…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Tom F. Sterkenburg , Peter D. Grünwald

Shared training approaches, such as multi-task learning (MTL) and gradient-based meta-learning, are widely used in various machine learning applications, but they often suffer from negative transfer, leading to performance degradation in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Anshul Thakur , Yichen Huang , Soheila Molaei , Yujiang Wang , David A. Clifton

According to the No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems all black-box algorithms perform equally well when compared over the entire set of optimization problems. An important problem related to NFL is finding a test problem for which a given…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Mihai Oltean

In this paper, we introduce a novel theoretical framework for multi-task regression, applying random matrix theory to provide precise performance estimations, under high-dimensional, non-Gaussian data distributions. We formulate a…

Multi-task learning aims to acquire a set of functions, either regressors or classifiers, that perform well for diverse tasks. At its core, the idea behind multi-task learning is to exploit the intrinsic similarity across data sources to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

This paper addresses the problem of unsupervised domain adaption from theoretical and algorithmic perspectives. Existing domain adaptation theories naturally imply minimax optimization algorithms, which connect well with the domain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-24 Yuchen Zhang , Tianle Liu , Mingsheng Long , Michael I. Jordan

In meta reinforcement learning (meta RL), an agent learns from a set of training tasks how to quickly solve a new task, drawn from the same task distribution. The optimal meta RL policy, a.k.a. the Bayes-optimal behavior, is well defined,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Zohar Rimon , Aviv Tamar , Gilad Adler

This study aims to explore the performance improvement method of large language models based on GPT-4 under the multi-task learning framework and conducts experiments on two tasks: text classification and automatic summary generation.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Zhen Qi , Jiajing Chen , Shuo Wang , Bingying Liu , Hongye Zheng , Chihang Wang

Multi-Task Learning is a learning paradigm that uses correlated tasks to improve performance generalization. A common way to learn multiple tasks is through the hard parameter sharing approach, in which a single architecture is used to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Angelica Tiemi Mizuno Nakamura , Denis Fernando Wolf , Valdir Grassi

Non-stationary environments are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. If the state transition and/or reward functions change based on latent factors, the agent is effectively tasked with optimizing a behavior that maximizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , Bruno C. da Silva

While neural networks are powerful function approximators, they suffer from catastrophic forgetting when the data distribution is not stationary. One particular formalism that studies learning under non-stationary distribution is provided…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-13 Xu He , Jakub Sygnowski , Alexandre Galashov , Andrei A. Rusu , Yee Whye Teh , Razvan Pascanu

As training datasets grow larger, we aspire to develop models that generalize well to any diverse test distribution, even if the latter deviates significantly from the training data. Various approaches like domain adaptation, domain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Andreas Loukas , Karolis Martinkus , Ed Wagstaff , Kyunghyun Cho

Many real-world machine learning applications involve several learning tasks which are inter-related. For example, in healthcare domain, we need to learn a predictive model of a certain disease for many hospitals. The models for each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-03 Inci M. Baytas , Ming Yan , Anil K. Jain , Jiayu Zhou

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is essential for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs). In practice, LLMs are often required to handle a diverse set of tasks from multiple domains, a scenario naturally addressed by multi-task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Jinda Liu , Bo Cheng , Yi Chang , Yuan Wu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems are being considered under increasingly more complex structures. While tabular and linear models have been thoroughly explored, the analytical study of RL under nonlinear function approximation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Aya Kayal , Sattar Vakili , Laura Toni , Alberto Bernacchia