Task Switching Network for Multi-Task Learning

Abstract

We introduce Task Switching Networks (TSNs), a task-conditioned architecture with a single unified encoder/decoder for efficient multi-task learning. Multiple tasks are performed by switching between them, performing one task at a time. TSNs have a constant number of parameters irrespective of the number of tasks. This scalable yet conceptually simple approach circumvents the overhead and intricacy of task-specific network components in existing works. In fact, we demonstrate for the first time that multi-tasking can be performed with a single task-conditioned decoder. We achieve this by learning task-specific conditioning parameters through a jointly trained task embedding network, encouraging constructive interaction between tasks. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art results on two challenging multi-task benchmarks, PASCAL-Context and NYUD. Our analysis of the learned task embeddings further indicates a connection to task relationships studied in the recent literature.