A Modulation Module for Multi-task Learning with Applications in Image Retrieval

Xiangyun Zhao, Haoxiang Li*, Xiaohui Shen, Xiaodan Liang, Ying Wu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

23 Scopus citations

Abstract

Multi-task learning has been widely adopted in many computer vision tasks to improve overall computation efficiency or boost the performance of individual tasks, under the assumption that those tasks are correlated and complementary to each other. However, the relationships between the tasks are complicated in practice, especially when the number of involved tasks scales up. When two tasks are of weak relevance, they may compete or even distract each other during joint training of shared parameters, and as a consequence undermine the learning of all the tasks. This will raise destructive interference which decreases learning efficiency of shared parameters and lead to low quality loss local optimum w.r.t. shared parameters. To address the this problem, we propose a general modulation module, which can be inserted into any convolutional neural network architecture, to encourage the coupling and feature sharing of relevant tasks while disentangling the learning of irrelevant tasks with minor parameters addition. Equipped with this module, gradient directions from different tasks can be enforced to be consistent for those shared parameters, which benefits multi-task joint training. The module is end-to-end learnable without ad-hoc design for specific tasks, and can naturally handle many tasks at the same time. We apply our approach on two retrieval tasks, face retrieval on the CelebA dataset [12] and product retrieval on the UT-Zappos50K dataset [34, 35], and demonstrate its advantage over other multi-task learning methods in both accuracy and storage efficiency.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationComputer Vision – ECCV 2018 - 15th European Conference, 2018, Proceedings
EditorsMartial Hebert, Vittorio Ferrari, Cristian Sminchisescu, Yair Weiss
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages415-432
Number of pages18
ISBN (Print)9783030012458
DOIs
StatePublished - 2018
Event15th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2018 - Munich, Germany
Duration: Sep 8 2018Sep 14 2018

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11205 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other15th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2018
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityMunich
Period9/8/189/14/18

Funding

Acknowledgements. This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant IIS-1217302, IIS-1619078, the Army Research Office ARO W911NF-16-1-0138, and Adobe Collaboration Funding.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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