Wenbin Hu


2021

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BanditMTL: Bandit-based Multi-task Learning for Text Classification
Yuren Mao | Zekai Wang | Weiwei Liu | Xuemin Lin | Wenbin Hu
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Task variance regularization, which can be used to improve the generalization of Multi-task Learning (MTL) models, remains unexplored in multi-task text classification. Accordingly, to fill this gap, this paper investigates how the task might be effectively regularized, and consequently proposes a multi-task learning method based on adversarial multi-armed bandit. The proposed method, named BanditMTL, regularizes the task variance by means of a mirror gradient ascent-descent algorithm. Adopting BanditMTL in the multi-task text classification context is found to achieve state-of-the-art performance. The results of extensive experiments back up our theoretical analysis and validate the superiority of our proposals.