Multitask Learning With Enhanced Modules

In multitask learning (MTL) paradigm, modularity is an effective way to achieve component and parameter reuse as well as system extensibility. In this work, we introduce two enhanced modules named res-fire module (RF) and dimension reduction module(DR) to improve the performance of modular MTL network – PathNet. In addition, in order to further improve the transfer ability of the network, we apply learnable scale parameters to merge the outputs of the modules in the same layer and then scatter to the next layer. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR, SVHN and MiniImageNet demonstrate that, with the similar scale as PathNet, our architecture achieves remarkable improvement in both transfer ability and expression ability. Our design used x5.23 fewer generations to achieve 99% accuracy on a source-to-target MNIST classification task compared with DeepMind’s PathNet. We also increase the accuracy of CIFARSVHN transfer task by x1.9. Also we get 70.75% accuracy on miniImageNet.