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Poster
Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning
Tianhe Yu · Saurabh Kumar · Abhishek Gupta · Sergey Levine · Karol Hausman · Chelsea Finn

Wed Dec 09 09:00 PM -- 11:00 PM (PST) @ Poster Session 4 #1208
in Poster Session 5 »

While deep learning and deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems have demonstrated impressive results in domains such as image classification, game playing, and robotic control, data efficiency remains a major challenge. Multi-task learning has emerged as a promising approach for sharing structure across multiple tasks to enable more efficient learning. However, the multi-task setting presents a number of optimization challenges, making it difficult to realize large efficiency gains compared to learning tasks independently. The reasons why multi-task learning is so challenging compared to single-task learning are not fully understood. In this work, we identify a set of three conditions of the multi-task optimization landscape that cause detrimental gradient interference, and develop a simple yet general approach for avoiding such interference between task gradients. We propose a form of gradient surgery that projects a task's gradient onto the normal plane of the gradient of any other task that has a gradient. On a series of challenging multi-task supervised and multi-task RL problems, this approach leads to substantial gains in efficiency and performance. Further, it is model-agnostic and can be combined with previously-proposed multi-task architectures for enhanced performance.

[ Paper ]

Author Information

Tianhe Yu (Stanford University)
Saurabh Kumar (Stanford University)
Abhishek Gupta (UC Berkeley)
Sergey Levine (UC Berkeley)
Karol Hausman (Google Brain)
Chelsea Finn (Stanford)

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