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Poster
Generative multitask learning mitigates target-causing confounding
Taro Makino · Krzysztof Geras · Kyunghyun Cho

Thu Dec 01 02:00 PM -- 04:00 PM (PST) @ Hall J #426
in Poster Session 6 »

We propose generative multitask learning (GMTL), a simple and scalable approach to causal machine learning in the multitask setting. Our approach makes a minor change to the conventional multitask inference objective, and improves robustness to target shift. Since GMTL only modifies the inference objective, it can be used with existing multitask learning methods without requiring additional training. The improvement in robustness comes from mitigating unobserved confounders that cause the targets, but not the input. We refer to them as \emph{target-causing confounders}. These confounders induce spurious dependencies between the input and targets. This poses a problem for conventional multitask learning, due to its assumption that the targets are conditionally independent given the input. GMTL mitigates target-causing confounding at inference time, by removing the influence of the joint target distribution, and predicting all targets jointly. This removes the spurious dependencies between the input and targets, where the degree of removal is adjustable via a single hyperparameter. This flexibility is useful for managing the trade-off between in- and out-of-distribution generalization. Our results on the Attributes of People and Taskonomy datasets reflect an improved robustness to target shift across four multitask learning methods.

Keywords: Causality · robustness · multitask learning · out-of-distribution generalization · Causal Machine Learning · causal representation learning
[ Paper]  [ Poster]  [ OpenReview] 

Author Information

Taro Makino (New York University)
Krzysztof Geras (New York University)
Kyunghyun Cho (Genentech / NYU)

Kyunghyun Cho is an associate professor of computer science and data science at New York University and a research scientist at Facebook AI Research. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Université de Montréal until summer 2015 under the supervision of Prof. Yoshua Bengio, and received PhD and MSc degrees from Aalto University early 2014 under the supervision of Prof. Juha Karhunen, Dr. Tapani Raiko and Dr. Alexander Ilin. He tries his best to find a balance among machine learning, natural language processing, and life, but almost always fails to do so.

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