Pareto Manifold Learning: Tackling multiple tasks via ensembles of single-task models

TL;DR

Pareto Manifold Learning introduces an ensembling approach in weight space to efficiently learn a continuous Pareto Front in multi-task learning, enabling balanced task performance modulation during inference.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel linear parameterization of the Pareto Front in weight space, allowing continuous tradeoff control with a single training run.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art single-point algorithms on benchmarks

Learns a better Pareto parameterization than multi-point baselines

Demonstrates effectiveness across diverse datasets and tasks

Abstract

In Multi-Task Learning (MTL), tasks may compete and limit the performance achieved on each other, rather than guiding the optimization to a solution, superior to all its single-task trained counterparts. Since there is often not a unique solution optimal for all tasks, practitioners have to balance tradeoffs between tasks' performance, and resort to optimality in the Pareto sense. Most MTL methodologies either completely neglect this aspect, and instead of aiming at learning a Pareto Front, produce one solution predefined by their optimization schemes, or produce diverse but discrete solutions. Recent approaches parameterize the Pareto Front via neural networks, leading to complex mappings from tradeoff to objective space. In this paper, we conjecture that the Pareto Front admits a linear parameterization in parameter space, which leads us to propose \textit{Pareto Manifold Learning}, an ensembling method in weight space. Our approach produces a continuous Pareto Front in a single training run, that allows to modulate the performance on each task during inference. Experiments on multi-task learning benchmarks, ranging from image classification to tabular datasets and scene understanding, show that \textit{Pareto Manifold Learning} outperforms state-of-the-art single-point algorithms, while learning a better Pareto parameterization than multi-point baselines.