Towards Consistent Multi-Task Learning: Unlocking the Potential of Task-Specific Parameters

Abstract

Multi-task learning (MTL) has gained widespread application for its ability to transfer knowledge across tasks, improving resource efficiency and generalization. However, gradient conflicts from different tasks remain a major challenge in MTL. Previous gradient-based and loss-based methods primarily focus on gradient optimization in shared parameters, often overlooking the potential of task-specific parameters. This work points out that task-specific parameters not only capture task-specific information but also influence the gradients propagated to shared parameters, which in turn affects gradient conflicts. Motivated by this insight, we propose ConsMTL, which models MTL as a bi-level optimization problem: in the upper-level optimization, we perform gradient aggregation on shared parameters to find a joint update vector that minimizes gradient conflicts; in the lower-level optimization, we introduce an additional loss for task-specific parameters guiding the k gradients of shared parameters to gradually converge towards the joint update vector. Our design enables the optimization of both shared and task-specific parameters to consistently alleviate gradient conflicts. Extensive experiments show that ConsMTL achieves state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks with task numbers ranging from 2 to 40, demonstrating its superior performance.