A Dozen Tricks with Multitask Learning

Abstract

Multitask Learning is an inductive transfer method that improves generalization accuracy on a main task by using the information contained in the training signals of other related tasks. It does this by learning the extra tasks in parallel with the main task while using a shared representation; what is learned for each task can help other tasks be learned better. This chapter describes a dozen opportunities for applying multitask learning in real problems. At the end of the chapter we also make several suggestions for how to get the most our of multitask learning on real-world problems.